HP workstations and SFF drives

Some HP servers (that are actually smaller than an HP Z820) can fit up to 16 (yes, sixteen) SFF drives.

HP Proliant ML370 G5 server with a 16-bay backplane

HP Z820

How many can a Z820 fit? Four in standard LFF (Legacy Form Factor) bays (see "8" in the illustration above) and 4-6 more, two per optical bay using an adapter like this:

HP 2.5in HDD 2-in-1 Optical Bay Bracket P/N FX615AA

...or this:

HP Z420 Handle in Top Optical Bay A9A48AA

...that fits in an optical 5.25" bays.

That's a total of ten (eight if there's a DVD drive), while the system has fourteen SAS/SATA ports. You can see where we're going with this.

Why SFF (Small Form Factor) drives? For one, they're the present and immediate future of storage. SSDs are mostly SFF or smaller. SFF drives benefit from less vibration and can be made to higher tolerances. More SFF drives can fit in the same space which means higher speeds when you stripe them, which in turn means you may not need a heavy, bulky, expensive external SAS expander box to house a bunch of drives for those uncompressed 4K workflows.

Enter HP 4-in-1 SFF (2.5in) HDD Carrier (P/N B8K60AA) retailing for $139 and what really is Icy Dock MB994SP-4S. Says so on the label.

This metal device lets you use four SAS or SATA spinning or SSD drives, and has two fans and four SAS ports in the back, in addition to a single Molex 4-pin power connector.Two of those, and you can have a total of 12 drives in the system. Not quite server grade: HP server drive trays are much, much nicer, support hot swapping with the right controller, and their activity light indicate possible fault and RAID set identification, besides, well, activity. This unit's activity lights are tiny, hard to see, and in my experience, don't always work. We've asked HP to come up with server-grade backplanes for the workstations and still hoping it might happen.

How many of these units can fit in a Z820? Theoretically three as there are three "optical" (5.25" half-height) bays in a Z820, two if an internal CD or DVD drive is used. They're a rather tight fit against the CPU fan housing so choose your SATA cables wisely: those with long necks may not work well.

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HP Z820 memory benchmark

HP Z820 is roughly 80% faster in memory bandwidth (speed) vs. HP Z800, in WinSAT memory speed test.  This is very significant for memory intensive applications such as video editing, encoding, etc.

HP Z820 (B2C03UT, one Xeon E5-2630 CPU, 32GB DDR3-1600 RAM running at 1333MHz): 27.6GB/s.

HP Z820 B2C03UT, 32GB RAM

Compare that to HP Z800 (FL878UT, two E5530 CPUs, 18GB DDR3-1333 RAM running at 1066MHz): 15.2GB/s

HP Z800 FL878UT 18GB RAM

To perform the test, run "WinSAT mem" from administrative command prompt ("cmd" in administrative mode).  For instructions, refer to "Quick Disk Benchmark in Windows" post on this blog.

Theoretically, Z820's quad channel configuration (vs. triple-channel in Z800) accounts for a 25% increase; so does faster memory (1333MHz vs. 1066MHz).  The theoretical increase should have been roughly 50% - not quite the 80% improvement we clocked.  I will try to find a faster Z800 and benchmark it as well.

What is the memory speed of your system?

Liquid Cooling Goes Mainstream with HP Z800

Quietly and without much fanfare, Hewlett Packard began offering liquid cooling on its Z-series workstations. Liquid cooling kits have been around for years, usually as after-market options for overclockers. With HP offering it as a standard item, liquid cooling becomes less of "living on the edge" gaming affair, and more of a mainstream option, albeit for expensive top shelf models of their workstations.

While there seem to be no pre-configured models with liquid cooling kits installed, the Z800 "configure your own model" page has two options under "Thermal Kit": "HP Air Cooling Solution [Add $1], and "HP Liquid Cooling Solution [Add $250]". The latter is only supported with "High Power" processors, Intel models W5580 (3.2GHz) and W5590 (3.33GHz).

A brief trip to Google uncovered a great article on ComputerWorld that was just posted yesterday. Besides reducing power-sapping heat, liquid cooling serves another purpose that is critical for workstations: reducing fan noise. According to the article, the noise is cut down by 8 dB under heavy load (from 38 to 30 dB), and this is a big deal for those of us who don't enjoy monotonous and often annoying fan humming.

A well configured base liquid-cooled Z800 workstation will only run you $10,698.00. Peanuts for those of us who appreciate quietness. Here are the specs:

HP Z800 Workstation FF825AV-PR800
• Genuine Windows Vista® Business 64-bit
• HP Z800 1110W 89% Efficient Chassis
• 2 Intel® Xeon® W5580 3.20GHz 8MB/1333 QC CPUs
• HP Liquid Cooling Solution
• HP 24GB (12x2GB) DDR3-1333 ECC RAM (Dual Processor)
• HP NVIDIA Quadro FX3800 1GB Graphics
• HP 300GB SAS 15K 1st HDD
• HP SATA Blu-Ray Writer
• HP 3 year standard warranty

$10,698.00 (buy it from DV411)

Availability: HP usually ships "configure your own" models within 1-2 weeks.

Additional information:

• Listen to samples of noise produced by air- and liquid-cooled Z800 workstations in this review: Liquid-cooled HP Z800 Workstation Test Drive (Jan Ozer, Aug 10, 2009)
• HP Z800 home page
• Asetek Technology Helps Improve Acoustics on Ultra Quiet Workstations from HP, Aug 09, 2009