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- Joined: Tue Jun 19, 2007 6:23 pm
- Location: Calne, Wiltshire, UK
I wonder if anybody has specific enough experience or expertise to help me?
I am running HW on a Dell Precision 3640 tower workstation, which I bought about two years ago specifically for HW and nothing else. It has two M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD slots on the motherboard and there is a PCI riser card with a third slot. When I first set it up, I added two 2TB SSD drives, using one of them for my HW set-up and the other for the cache. This worked well at first but I have accumulated too many sample sets now to fit.
I decided to upgrade my storage capacity and bought a Western Digital Black 4 TB drive. Unfortunately I couldn't get the computer to boot if it was in any of the three slots. I eventually returned it, and instead bought a Sabrent 8 TB drive, which was hugely expensive, but I have the same drive in my Precision 7740 laptop and thought it would be compatible. It doesn't seem to be, as again I couldn't get it to boot. I tried it in the laptop and the drive itself seems to be fine. In the end I bought a Sabrent housing for the drive and I am now running it as an external drive using one of the USB3 ports. Rather surprisingly, the speed is still acceptable even when loading a large organ, though it is still slower than the internal drives were.
Unfortunately this configuration seems a bit unreliable, and Windows will very often fail to detect the drive, or worse, suddenly lose it while an organ is loading or unloading. This not only results in HW hanging but it also automatically deletes the cache for that organ, and of course they take a long time to rebuild.
I am beginning to wonder whether my motherboard is fundamentally incompatible with SSD drives over 2 TB, or whether it will work with a different make. The Dell website lets you enter the service tag of the device and it will show any upgrades that they sell which are compatible with your specific computer. In my case the largest SSD on offer is 2 TB, but I don't know whether that is because of compatibility or some other reason.
Crucial and Kingston both allow you to enter the model number of a computer and they will display compatible SSD's and RAM. Entering Dell Precision 3640, they both offer 4 TB SSD's which they say are compatible. The Crucial ones are quite reasonably priced (certainly compared to last year) and if they work I would be happy to buy two of them.
So can anybody tell me which of these three scenarios is most likely?
1. My motherboard is fundamentally incompatible with a PCIe SSD drive over 2 TB
2. My motherboard is compatible with a drive of this size but only some makes
3. My motherboard should be compatible with any of them but is malfunctioning in some way (in which case how do I test it?)
Any thoughts? I would much rather buy a new drive than a new computer (it has an i9 10-core processor and 128 GB RAM, so it runs even the most demanding sample sets well).
I am running HW on a Dell Precision 3640 tower workstation, which I bought about two years ago specifically for HW and nothing else. It has two M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD slots on the motherboard and there is a PCI riser card with a third slot. When I first set it up, I added two 2TB SSD drives, using one of them for my HW set-up and the other for the cache. This worked well at first but I have accumulated too many sample sets now to fit.
I decided to upgrade my storage capacity and bought a Western Digital Black 4 TB drive. Unfortunately I couldn't get the computer to boot if it was in any of the three slots. I eventually returned it, and instead bought a Sabrent 8 TB drive, which was hugely expensive, but I have the same drive in my Precision 7740 laptop and thought it would be compatible. It doesn't seem to be, as again I couldn't get it to boot. I tried it in the laptop and the drive itself seems to be fine. In the end I bought a Sabrent housing for the drive and I am now running it as an external drive using one of the USB3 ports. Rather surprisingly, the speed is still acceptable even when loading a large organ, though it is still slower than the internal drives were.
Unfortunately this configuration seems a bit unreliable, and Windows will very often fail to detect the drive, or worse, suddenly lose it while an organ is loading or unloading. This not only results in HW hanging but it also automatically deletes the cache for that organ, and of course they take a long time to rebuild.
I am beginning to wonder whether my motherboard is fundamentally incompatible with SSD drives over 2 TB, or whether it will work with a different make. The Dell website lets you enter the service tag of the device and it will show any upgrades that they sell which are compatible with your specific computer. In my case the largest SSD on offer is 2 TB, but I don't know whether that is because of compatibility or some other reason.
Crucial and Kingston both allow you to enter the model number of a computer and they will display compatible SSD's and RAM. Entering Dell Precision 3640, they both offer 4 TB SSD's which they say are compatible. The Crucial ones are quite reasonably priced (certainly compared to last year) and if they work I would be happy to buy two of them.
So can anybody tell me which of these three scenarios is most likely?
1. My motherboard is fundamentally incompatible with a PCIe SSD drive over 2 TB
2. My motherboard is compatible with a drive of this size but only some makes
3. My motherboard should be compatible with any of them but is malfunctioning in some way (in which case how do I test it?)
Any thoughts? I would much rather buy a new drive than a new computer (it has an i9 10-core processor and 128 GB RAM, so it runs even the most demanding sample sets well).