Animus3D :
Ok, so I bought a Poweredge t310 to try to use as a desktop-ish thing. Now, before you yell at me for buying a server as a desktop, I got it for loose change.
It has an onboard RAID controller, of which has 2*1TB drives and a 240GB SSD. I want the SSD to be the boot drive, and don't need to put the HDDs in RAID anyways. (the PSU doesnt have enough SATA power cables because it wants you to use the RAID array)
Anyways, I try to boot it up, and it says "No Boot Device Available".
.-.
I've tried pretty much everything I can think of; plugging the boot drive into the only available SATA power cable and hooking it up to the onboard SATA ports, I tried to figure out if I could set it to some sort of non-raid drive in the RAID controller, etc.
Please help
P.S. the OS i'm trying to boot from is Windows 10 64bit
Animus3D,
In the T310, the boot device is going to be the RAID controller not a drive. You need to install the OS to the controller which may a PERC 6/i or H200. Find the driver from Dell.com \support for the RAID controller. From the installation disk or flash drive- or make one by downloading WinPE from MS.com- run the installation to the prompt to load drivers and load the controller driver from the flash drive.
You also need to configure the various disks and the disk mode in BIOS- possible autodect RAID and AHCI and make sure that the disks are converted to non-RAID or you may forever have a long startup with RAID messages. The startup anyway will load the controller BIOS before starting, though with an SSD it should be quite fast.
This is bit fussy to work out, but start from the idea that you need to first get BIOS to recognize the RAID controller as the boot drive, so loading the driver and setting the boot sequence,configuring the RAID mode and then adding the OS and programs, etc will take some study to do it in the right order. I added a PERC H310 controller to a Dell Precision T5500 and today I'm not sure what I eventually did right!
Servers can be beautiful machines, but are designed for a different purpose plus complicated to setup and very noisy. Not to throw a wrench into the works, but you might have a look at Dell Precision T3500's. If you doing 3D CAD modeling it could have much better performance, easier to configure, and much quieter. I bought one for $53 with 4GB and a 500GB WD Black, added a Xeon X5677 4-core @ 3.47 / 3.73GHz for $60, 12GB RAM for $40 and it's a really capable 3D system. That will have a much higher single-thread CPU speed than any CPU that can be used in the T310.
Dell Precision T3500 PC W3503 2.4GHz 500GB 6GB WIN 7 Pro SP1 64-bit DVDRW Sold for $50
Intel Xeon X5677 SLBV9 3.46GHZ 12MB 6.4GT/s LGA 1366 Quad-Core CPU Processor > Sold for $38
Intel Xeon X5680 3.3/ 3.6GHz 6-Core Processor SLBV5 > sold for $105 That.s 6-cores /12 threads at up to 3.6GHz for rendering,
The maximum CPU for the T310 is the Xeon X3480: average CPU mark
5958 and single Thread Rating
1416. The maximum T3500 CPU is a W3690 6-core @3.47 /3.73GHz:
9519 /
1571 which would get a lot better performance out of the GPU in 3D.
Cheers,
BambiBoom
Precision T3500 (2011) (
Original) Xeon W3530 4-core @ 2.8 /3.06GHz > 4GB (2X 2GB) DDR3-1333 ECC > GeForce 9800 GT (1GB)> WD Black 500GB
[Passmark system rating =
1963, CPU = 4482 / 2D= 609 / 3D=
805 / Mem= 1409 / Disk=1048]
Dell Precision T3500 (2011) (Rev 2) Xeon X5677 4-core @ 3.46 / 3.73GHz > 12GB (6X 2GB) DDR3-1333 ECC > Quadro 4000 (2GB) > PERC 6/i + Seagate 300GB 15K SAS ST3300657SS + WD Black 500GB > 525W PSU> Windows 7 Professional 64-bit > 2X Dell 19" LCD
[Passmark system rating =
2751> CPU = 7236 / 2D= 658 / 3D=
2020 / Mem= 1875 / Disk=1221]
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