HP Z600

[Tarsun2]

new project here.
have an older HP Z600 Work Station. cleaned it out and installed ubuntu.
had a few hard drives and set up a RAID 0 array. nothing special there really.

the mother board has provisions for a second CPU and i never took advantage of that.

But NOW i have 2 intel xeon e5 - 1620 v3 cpu's.

and a NVIDIA NVS 310 gpu.

I have a bunch of 8GB ram that should work as well.

anything i should know before going through the work of installing dual xenon cpu's?

[Tarsun2]

just a follow up, the older board of the Z600 does not fit the newer CPU's.
also i found a firepro 3d graphics card that im going to use.

the Z600 is older and will not fit the 8GB ram cards

[Seajay]

It is a workstation so make sure you have ECC memory. You'll need to make sure it is also compatible memory, as workstations tend to be specific about the hardware you can use (accuracy and all that).

You can check the HP docs: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01709709
I'm not sure if HP has any proprietary stuff, but you might need to research a bit.

Can't help with dual CPU setup, but Linux does support dual CPU setups. If you run into issues I'd check hardware first, since Linux Should work fine.

[Tarsun2]

thanks for the info; ill look into it more.
its a side project that im putting together from scraps. just to see if i can do it and what can be done.
so far its up and running but there's a tone more i want to do. what ill use the PC for, idk. lol

[Seajay]

Well most use them as servers or rendering / compute if you use blender or video editing. I think they can be fine for gaming but the setup is designed for doing something accurately, so it might be a little funky to get games running how you expect them to.

[flyweightnate]

I used these for heavy CAD/FEA/CFD work. They were very picky about components, as stated above. Very stable once it got up and running, though - I would run some Sims for weeks without issues.

[Tarsun2]

i was thinking of a home based server with movies, music, and photos.

[Seajay]

Definitely doable, you should be able to tweak it for efficiency since media storage use with some network overhead is far and below what it is capable of doing. Have it manage a NAS and any other network storage, backup operations, even some home cameras if you wanted and it won't even be partially taxed.

[Tarsun2]

like a race horse giving pony rides

[Tarsun2]

stumbled across another graphics card.
geforce gtx 780

also scored two 3000GB hard drives. (not sure why they didnt just say 3 TB, maybe they could have saved some $ on ink lol)

[Siress]

I do not recommend installing 2 CPUs for a home server. It'll increase idle energy usage considerably, and you're rarely ever going to be CPU bound by 1 CPU anyway. Is there some reason you want 2?

You need to clutch the manual for the motherboard and triple check compatibility before purchasing critical components (CPU, RAM, PSU). Then you need to update all firmware before installing them.

ECC RAM is not all the same. For a home server, I recommend Unbuffered ECC RAM at the highest clock speed your mobo can support. I also recommend not mixing different models of RAM together as it can cause issues.

RAID 0 for a home server is madness. You need a software RAID setup to protect against drive failure and bit rot. Software RAID coupled with a file system that has data integrity checks built in - pretty much limiting your options to zfs and btrfs - gets you 66% of the way to full data security. An off-site backup on a separate system gets you to 100%.

[Tarsun2]

its just an ongoing learning curve with e-waste that crosses my desk at work.
the geforce will not work. it uses an 8 pin while the HP uses a 6 pin.

im just messing around with it and learning things. why 2 CPUs? because i can... lol

i never knew about RAID arrays until i started messing around with this HP. (string, mirror, and strip) this was all new to me. i have tons of clean hard drives and i put together a RAID array just to learn... i dont use it but its there. i then learned about benchmarking and found out that some of those drives have some bad sectors.

i thought computers were like usb ports; standardized. im learning allot lol

its all free, takes minimal effort, and not much time. i mess with it on my lunch break.

i dont know what im even going to do with the tower.

[Siress]

Sounds like a good deal, then!

For safe storage of your data, Just remember: 3-2-1 data backup applies to multiple systems, Data integrity applies to each system. e.g. RAID does not count as a backup.

If you want to learn more about the current state of RAID with a detailed explination of why most RAID guides you find are outdated, give this video a watch.

[Tarsun2]

dang, even something like a mirrored array?

[Seajay]

dang, even something like a mirrored array?

Ya Raid is not a backup but more like a way to prevent down-time. A mirrored array is kind of a waste compared to just doing a backup, since normal use doesn't really have a high failure rate. It is awful for performance too, less so with SSD's but still not great.
When you start doing tons of data transfers continuously you can use RAID 10 to expand storage and allow you to replace failing drives with minimal down-time. The problem though is the more drives you have the more drives you need to account for storage allocation and failure. If you have 5 drives I think you can then replace 1 at a time, however if 2 drives fail the RAID fails.

A true backup is basically 2 separate disk drives on different platforms, or a removal drive, so if the system dies it doesn't take the backup with it. Or cloud storage.