Precision 7710 Owner's Thread

Thanks, Aaron, much appreciated!

Erik

 

Hi,

Grats. But......
Last Friday they offered me a 7720 for my M6700. Since I need a Pascal graphics card I would be very unhappy if they offered me the 7710

That can't be true. They did it when they replaced my M6500 with M6700 und now I expect this to work out again.

Cheers,
Alex

 

@RealJEDI, I'm envious, Alex, but I really can't complain much. They are replacing my M6700 with a 7710 that matches or beats every spec on my 6700. When I pointed out that the 6700 had a DVD drive, they didn't hesitate to throw in an external optical drive. Then they upgraded me to 32GB mewmory just because I asked nicely.

On your second point, you're saying that you upgraded your peplacement system once before? I actually refrained from asking if this was an option after people here said it's not allowed. Are you saying that you are currently negotiating with Dell to upgrade options on your 7720 replacement system by paying the difference in cost?

I'm still hoping someone here will post a DiskMark on the performance of a two 960PRO's RAID0'd together in the 7710. That's what I'm planning to buy as primary storage - (2) 1TB 960PRO's to RAID0 together into a super fast drive. But I'm skeptical that the 7710 can really run both of them simultaneously at full speed. 960EVOs or Crucial MX300's are WAY cheaper, and I almost wonder if the 7710's internal bus can really go faster than a pair of EVO's RAID0'd together would deliver...

Erik

 

One more ?, about cloning the boot drive onto a RAID volume...

My replacement system will arrive from Dell with a single SATA drive as the system disk, pre-configured by Dell with all the drivers, etc. My intention is to install 2 new Samsung 960PRO M.2 SSD's and RAID0 them together into a super-fast drive that will be partitioned into boot and data volumes. That would mean that I will need to clone the SATA boot drive supplied by dell onto the boot partition of the RAID0 array.

I vaguely remember something (from years ago) about how Windows won't boot from a RAID disk unless it was originally installed on the RAID disk. Is that still true? Will I be able to simply clone the SATA boot drive onto the RAID drive and boot from it, or is it harder than that?

Thanks in advance,
Erik

 

These are my detailed notes when I last when from AHCI -> RAID 0 without a reinstall, I hope it helps you. It's not difficult but there are steps to take, and I kept these notes as there is a lot of good and bad info on the internet about this. While it's not exactly what you are trying to do, I think it's close enough to be useful? Let me know!

My environment - laptop running Windows 10 Pro. I have two Samsung 850 PRO 1 TB SSDs that I wanted to move from AHCI to RAID 0. My system was entirely on the C: drive/first SSD, the D: drive was installed and empty.

I used Macrium Free for my backup/restore solution, it was invaluable to the effort as you will see.

I also was very careful to be sure I had backups, fallbacks etc. as I was working - I had many trial runs that failed before I found this process that worked, and I need to make sure I didn't lose anything!

Steps:
1. Make sure you create and test a Macrium Rescue USB.
2. Make sure you create and test booting successfully from a Windows 10 Recovery USB.
3. Use Macrium Free to create an image of C:
4. Go into Macrium restore only to VERIFY the image - make sure it is good!
5. Reboot - go into BIOS - change BIOS setting from AHCI to RAID. Be sure (in my BIOS) that ability to enter RAID firmware via Control-I is enabled.
6. Go into Control-I - create RAID array of the 2 identical SSDs. Select block size of 128KB.
7. Boot to Macrium Rescue USB - restore backed up image on partition (now just one partition shows, as both SSDs are one RAID 0 array)
8. Exit Macrium, boot to Windows 10 Recover USB. This is where things didn't work quite right but it worked out ok. The purpose of this step was to boot into Safe Mode - maybe there is a better way?

I believed that I could boot to Safe Mode through the Recovery USB, because I read that you really can't F8 to Safe Mode with SSD-based systems anymore because they are too fast. So when the Recovery USB booted, first screen I picked US keyboard, then Troubleshoot, then Advanced Options, then Command Prompt. I did a DIR C: and saw my restored image! I typed Exit, and chose Turn off your PC. I assumed that I had been in safe mode, but in retrospect I was not.

This failed - upon reboot, I got INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DRIVE. So I rebooted with the Macrium Rescue USB, and did the Fix Boot Repair Problems, and that appeared to go fine as it found the Windows 10 image on C:. But on reboot I got the INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DRIVE again. I booted to the Windows Recovery USB again, and did Startup Repair, letting that USB take a shot at fixing things - but it said it couldn't fix it. It let me go back in the menu structure, so from that same boot I chose Command Line, and then I was able to run REGEDIT.

I read this next tip somewhere, that these three regedit locations should have a value of 0 for DWORD Start:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\storahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\pciide
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStorV

The problem was, they were already 0. Then I read that each of these had a tree "StartOverride", value of which should be 0. They were all 3, so I changed them to 0.

When I rebooted, I got a blue screen error saying there was some problem with the disk (I didn't write down the error). Maybe I should have left StartOverride as 3 under iaStorV, since I wanted RAID - it may have been complaining there was no selected disk driver type, but I am guessing here. But!!!! It gave me the option of hitting F8 to enter Safe Boot. PERFECT!

9. I hit F8, and go into Safe boot.
10. Once booted up, I run msconfig. I set it to do a Safe boot again from the Boot tab. I reboot. This may not have been necessary, but I wanted a clean automated boot into Safe Mode to be sure, as that is the process that will fix the lack of proper RAID disk drive in Windows.
11. It boots into Safe Boot, I run msconfig again. I unmark Safe Boot option, and on the General tab I select Normal Startup. I reboot.

That's it! The original INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DRIVE problem was that the system booted properly, but the restored Windows image had the wrong disk driver - when backed up it was AHCI, but the hardware/firmware was now RAID. Windows does not load all drives just the ones needed, to speed up the process. When you Safe Boot, ALL drivers are loaded, and it fixes the system/updates the registry to be able to access the RAID drive. Reboot then uses what Safe Boot corrected.

Once successfully into Windows 10 you may want to run the Intel Rapid Storage Technology program to see if you are happy with the settings.

Contrary to what you might read you do not have to install a fresh copy of Windows first on the new RAID array. You also do not have to worry about the MBR, it is fine.

Once into Windows 10 I also uninstalled the Samsung Disk Magician, I don't know if that was good to do or not but I thought it was not needed anymore. Was that correct from a performance perspective, is it till used?

I am running some of my longer running programs now to benchmark. The AS SSD Sequential read went from 525.55 MB/sec to 1037.19 MB/s, and sequential write went from 500.11 MB/sec to 940.84 MB/sec!

System is running like a champ!

 

@awalt has good details but it should be pretty straight-forward. He was moving from AHCI to RAID which involves a few more steps and registry mucking, but if your system was already set up with RAID turned on (but no arrays defined), it should be a bit simpler.

1. In the BIOS, make sure that the system is running in RAID mode and not AHCI mode. (This is the default for Dell systems so you should be fine there.)
2. Create RAID array.
3. Clone the SATA drive to RAID array using disk cloning software of your choice. (i.e. Macrium Reflect or Acronis True Image)
4. Disconnect or disable the SATA drive. <-- You can reconnect or re-enable after Windows is happy running on the RAID array... Sometimes it gets confused about which drive to mount after the clone, if the old drive is still present in the system.
5. Boot from RAID array, it should come up seamlessly.

Note, if you need to switch from AHCI to RAID first, that process is a bit easier than described above. Do it before you clone, rather than trying to clone and switch at the same time.

1. With Windows running, hold Shift and select "Restart". Some extra options will come up during reboot, choose troubleshooting and then advanced startup options.
2. While the system is rebooting, go to the BIOS and switch from AHCI to RAID.
3. When Windows boots, select the Safe Mode option.
4. After Safe Mode boots, reboot into normal mode.
5. Make sure that you have the latest Intel Rapid Storage drivers installed before proceeding with the cloning.

 

Yah, I assumed it was not set up as RAID already, thanks for the clarification Aaron. My system was not.

 

Thanks, Aaron and awalt! Much appreciated.

I can't imagine why it would come already set up with RAID. Dell is shipping it as a single-disk system, SATA drive only, empty M.2 slots. So I presume it will be set up for AHCI. Thanks so much for the detailed steps on what to do from there.

Erik

 

Dell generally has RAID set as the default mode of operation even in single-disk systems. (Don't ask me why.)

 

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. But this time there is catch: I have to pay regular prices (or: price differences) (instead of the ones shown an their website) -> that makes a plus of more than 1/3 (and made me reduce my wishes to a better graphics card only). Anyway: I negotiated nearly everything before (I even got the Xeon E3-1535M v6 as replacement for my i7-3920). So it comes down to the price difference of Quadro P4000 and P5000.
There's a second catch (and this is worse). The last time I had a replacment system I could buy a new starting warranty (5yrs ProSupport). This time I only have the rest of my running warranty (4 months left). But as soon as I get my system I'm planning to escalate this topic here in germany and we will see..

Cheers,
Alex