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November 15th, 2024 21:24

Adding a second drive cage to Dell R7910

TLDR: Will the 8TGM0 based upgrade kits used to go from 8 bays to 16 bays on the R730s work on a R7910?

Basically, I have both a Dell R730XD and R7910, currently only the Dell R730XD is in use as a NAS.  I am using the two flex bays for the OS, then 16 of the 24 front bays.  I have the NVME expansion card so the 4 right bays are actually U.2 drives.  The bulk of my storage is handled by a Dell PowerVault MD1200 connected through a SAS card in one of the half-height PCIE bays.

My desire is to do some playing around with AI so want to run a machine with two Tesla P40s.  I already own one that I bought years ago so just need to buy another.  In a perfect world I would just throw the two GPUs into the R730XD.  The problem with this plan is that one of the x16 slots doesn't support a double slot GPU of the 2 flex bay drives and the second x16 slot is currently occupied by the NVME expansion slot.  I could live without the NVME drives in the front, I would be bummed but I could replace those drives with some M.2 drives on bifurcated cards in the 2 remaining half-height PCIE bays.  Or possibly I could find some half-height PCIE expander cards to put in and still use the U.2 drives in the front?  But I still have the issue where I can still only fit 1 GPU in there unless rip out the flex bays, then modify the bracket for the GPU to fit in the slot that only has a bracket for a single PCIE device.

So this leaves the following options:

1) Run the R7910 and the R730XD at the same time
2) Buy a R730 with 16 bays
3) Upgrade the R7910 to have 16 bays

I really don't want to do option #1, the R730XD already idles at like 300 watts.  The R730XD also still has tons of capacity to run additional workloads.  I don't really want to do #2 either, sorta hard to explain to my wife why I bought another server, plus from what I understand the R7910s and R730s are very similar, so what is the point of more of the same hardware.

So this leaves #3 as the best option.  From my reading, the R730s can be upgraded with the 8TGM0 backplane, can I use the same kit that adds 8 more bays to a R730 to upgrade a R7910?

Moderator

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5.1K Posts

November 18th, 2024 01:08

Hello, R7910 is a workstation, although there might be a few parts that shared, however it’s not a server.

Sorry I can’t be of help this time. Let’s see what other community members think.

Respectfully,

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