Posts made by creayt

@MattSpeller

Throwing one in, possbily two if the model supports replacing the DVD drive w/ an internal housing, but it didn't come w/ one. I have a handful of 840 Pros lying around from an old workstation.

Have a love/hate with Dell. I've opted for them over almost all other competitors and mostly just wish their design was better. Actually ordered a new Dell laptop last night.

1080p @ 17.3"
Win 8
i7-5500U
8GB @ 1600MHz
GeForce 840M 2GB
DVD drive for some silly reason
Backlit keyboard

$839.

I got fed up w/ my 2015 Retina MBP for development and just needed something w/ a Windows keyboard. We'll see how it goes.

So I'm still at a loss for this but am going to deploy these SSDs in the next few days. @scottalanmiller , what do you think of over-provisioning them such that 20 or 25% of the full capacity is reserved per drive? Is that heinous ovekill?

The workload will be Windows Server 2012 R2, IIS, MySQL, and a J2EE app server, running for the most part a single application. Thanks.

@xByteSean said:

This is all dependent on them even being recognized though, as they will not have the Dell enterprise firmware on them which is truly needed to be compatible.

Thanks for all of the info, very handy. I read somewhere recently that Dell pushed a firmware update to the controller that took the "Dell certified" restrictions off and lets normal drives work, have you heard anything about that?

@todd-at-xByte said:

I can't speak for the 850's, but the SATA Edge SSD's we sell at xByte negotiate at 6Gbs and can be mixed with SAS. This works on both the H700 in the R610 and the H710 in the R620. The Edge drives will green light on the front panel but they do show up as non-Dell in open manage. While not supported by Dell, we sell these as a option to get the speed of SSD without the cost of Dell branded SSDs.

The R610 has a SAS 6/iR, not an H700 unfortunately.

Link to the "PowerEdge RAID Controller H710P" brochure here.

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/dell-perc-h710p-spec-sheet.pdf

1. I don't know if that's different than or the same as mine, which is a H710P Mini ( 1GB ).

2. If it's the same, it does say that it supports "up to 32 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s SATA drives, which is a relief.

@PSX_Defector said:

SAS and SATA do things slightly differently. They are electrically compatible but in order to interact with each other on the same backplane they need to negotiate down to an equal speed. Sounds as though your controller only does it at SATAII on this.

From reading around the net it looks like all you need is an interposer to get the full speed. Did you mean Sata I? I thought Sata II was 3 Gb, I was 1.5, and III was 6?

If you gank out the SAS drives, does it go at the right speed then? If you mix, does the SAS drives report and get the right speed?

Unfortunately I don't have the option of experimenting with that now. The box has some RAID going on and runs 6 or 7 mission-critical VMs.

Best bet is to use another device if you want to have pure SATA SSDs. A small SAN would do the trick.
Not an option unfortunately.

Better question is, why didn't you get SAS SSDs?
For the 840 Pros in the R610 I just had them lying around and we ended up having two flexible drive slots. For the new R620 and the 6x 1TB 850 Pros... because I presumed that they would just work, and I'm guessing SAS SSDs to rival the 850 Pros @ 1TB would be a million dollars each. If not please flip me some links, I can still return the 850 Pros. From reading around the net it sounds like some of the issue may be the mixing and matching of SAS w/ SATA SSDs in the same controller, on the R620 I'll have the datacenter techs try pure SSD before we reincorporate 4 of the leftover SAS drives into the system in case that's the difference. Was hoping there was some way to find out pre-deployment of the drives short of investing 12 hours into phone calls w/ Dell in order to find someone that's miraculously both able to speak English intelligibly and who knows what they're talking about and could actually answer my question.

@MattSpeller said:

H710 controllers + SSD's is a project I've wanted to do for a while, please let me know how it turns out. Better still, thrash it with some benchmarks if you have a spare hour or two!

At the moment it's going to be 6x 1TB 850 Pros in a Raid 10.

Anyone that can answer this: Is benchmarking SSDs considered to be detrimental to longevity and long-term performance out of curiosity? Is it similar to throwing weeks of use at the hardware all at once, or nah?

New to enterprise RAID controllers, and looking for some quick guidance.

Working w/ an R620 10-slot w/ a Perc H710P Mini ( 1GB ), and getting ready to deploy a bunch of SSDs to it.

Based on my recent experience w/ an R610 w/ a SAS 6/iR Integrated controller, where we found out late in the game that the controller can't/won't run the SATA SSDs at anything about 1.5 Mbps ( calls it its "negotiated speed" while listing the "3.0 Gbps capable speed" in OpenManage ) while intermingled w/ our other SAS drives, even though they're SATA III drives.

My question is, is there a way I can tell beforehand whether the R610 will use the 6 850 Pros I bought at a lower speed or their max of 6 Gbps?

@thecreativeone91 said:

Where do you need $50,000 to get the basics? Median income here is $37,000

Scott made it sound like $75k was just enough for "the basics", I was using 50 to demonstrate that 75 doesn't mean "the basics", it means "spending money". I agree with you but didn't want to get into a debate about how much "the basics" would be, so I went higher. In a lot of cities though, even terrible places to live require pretty shocking rent prices, so I don't think 37k could get you much above poverty in a place like New York City for example. It all depends.

@MattSpeller said:

I'd be motivated a lot more by a 4 day work week than more money. Unless it's substantially more money.

That's the same thing as money ( my opinion ). It's more money for less time. And I agree with you.

@scottalanmiller said:

Yes, no one is saying that it isn't motivating until you can afford the basics.

They pretty much are saying that, which is the point. $50,000, in all but the toughest neighborhoods ( like NYC ), can get you "the basics" provided you manage your money appropriately. It feels to me like some people here are arguing that "people will work harder for a little praise and artistic liberty at work than they will for an A5", which until someone proves me wrong, flies in the face of research, common sense, and the attitudes and opinions of most people I've talked to, in my industry at least. People work hard for money, which lets them do things they otherwise couldn't, and enjoy a level of security and comfort they otherwise couldn't. Whether their boss, coworkers, and peers tell them they're great at what they do and how wonderful their work is makes a lot of difference, and is great sure, but it's not as great as being able to have a beautiful 59 story home overlooking the beach and a helicopter in your backyard to take you to a far-off breakfast, or even better, to be able to retire at 40 ( a lot of programmers ) and have literally decades of extra free time to pursue your actual life passions.

@scottalanmiller said:

As someone who took a pretty massive paycut in order to have a better life and took a whopping paycut compared to what I was being offered.... I can tell you that money above a certain amount really does not motivate a lot of people. You need a certain level, but beyond that it just isn't worth very much.

A lot of people, sure. But not all people, and definitely not "most" people based on evidence. Most people want the freedom of not having to throw 40-80 hours at someone else's benefit in exchange for "the basics" and some compliments and would be exponentially happier spending the rest of their lives seeing the world and experiencing everything there is to experience, a caliber of happiness that money, exclusively, can buy.

@thanksajdotcom Princeton did a study recently semi-concluding that "to be happy/motivated/fulfilled, $75,000 a year works."

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00.html

Teaser: "People say money doesn't buy happiness. Except, according to a new study from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, it sort of does — up to about $75,000 a year. The lower a person's annual income falls below that benchmark, the unhappier he or she feels."

Agreed. Many studies show people get less performance/less effective with higher pay.

This guy just took a million dollar-ish pay cut specifically because money motivates ( and provides fulfillment to ) workers, if anyone's curious.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/14/gravity-payments-raise_n_7061676.html

@Nic said:

Joel Spolsky has a good article series on this topic:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/10.html

Joel makes abysmal software so I'll read it with a bucketful of salt but am excited to see if he found any actual evidence.

@MattSpeller said:

Motivating workers? The beatings will continue until productivity increases.

Hahahahahaha. Too good.

@thecreativeone91 Do you have some links? I'm guessing that whatever you're talking about is actually compared to slightly higher pay. If you produce a study that shows that people perform worse and are less effective when you double their salary, for example, I'll eat all of my words.

@coliver Totally disagree and would love to see some research and/or statistics to back up what to me feel like aggressively naive conclusions based on what appears to be an overly optimistic projection of what the majority of human beings might be like, but more probably, what you and any authors you're concurring with wish they were like, because it feels more noble.

@thanksajdotcom Definitely not. It was the actual money specifically, and the things it let me do in my personal life. I consider myself an excellent programmer, independent of whether my boss or company owner directly appreciates me as an asset ( a lot of the time they do not because we directly differ in subjective opinions on how software should look and work ). Money is what's kept me at that job, and what's kept me happy and motivated there, and I've definitely noticed that as the raises have gone up, so has my motivation.

@thanksajdotcom Disagree. I absolutely adore what I do, I've been obsessed with it since I wrote my first line of code. I liked my job a lot when I took it, still in college. But my motivation definitely skyrocketed when after the first year, and just about every year since, my boss pulled me into his office and said "We'd like to give you a raise. A gigantic one."

Money is a valid motivator at the very least for many people. I've seen it happen personally and in others a variety of times in a variety of workplaces. It's romantic to think that it isn't, and that there's enough flexibility, purpose, and freedom in every job out there to create meaning and "do something you love", but it's also naive. A lot of jobs simply don't have that maneuverability.