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?

HP Z800: The BMW M6 of Workstations

Under the hood, Z800 looks just like BMW M6 10-cyl 500hp GT cruiser: you can see the oil dipstick, everything else is shiny plastic and metal. To access slots, drives, memory and CPU, just lift off plastic panels: no tools required. The workstation can be taken apart and put back together in seconds with bare hands.

Speaking of bare hands, the workstation now features case handles. Unboxing, boxing, and simply moving the rather heavy system (45 lbs net) suddenly became so much easier. Unlike IBM designs, Z800 has two handles, and unlike Mac Pros, the handles are cylindrical and will not cut your hands.

Even the "high power" models (3.2GHz and up) are nearly silent. The fans kick up just a bit under full CPU load, yet it's quieter than xw8600 under load - and much, much faster.

Up to six SAS or SATA 3.5" drives can be fit inside, 4 in pluggable drive cages, 2 more - in optical bays, using special "optical bay mounting kits". All installed without a single screw.

My favorite configuration for a top-of-the line video editing system: 300GB 10K rpm SAS system drive, five 2TB 7200rpm SATA drives in RAID0 mode on the LSI controller, which gives a total of 10TB capacity and about 500MB/s transfer rates, enough for realtime uncompressed HD and 2K editing and previewing.

Fast, quiet, stable, well designed, easily expandable and upgradeable - what more can one ask for? It's the best workstation HP has come up with.

Eager to get one configured for video editing or visualization applications? See Z800 on DV411.