Help with Dell Poweredge T110

[deejayburnout]

Hi Peeps.

i need some help.

I recently acquired an old but fully functional Dell Poweredge T110 to use for running Serato for my turntables. It should have enough ompfh to run it.

I decided that i would install a fresh copy of Windows 10 on it but when installing, it doesn't get to far and it kept asking for drivers for the iirc is for the scsi device as it is not detecting the 2 drives that i plan to raid.

Never really dabbled in servers before so a bit of a noob. As this is an older server, am i better installing a server version of windows?

[peterb]

If they are SCSI drives, you may need the original drivers for the SCSI card. Adaptec were one of the main producers of SCSI cards and if it is an Adaptec card, you might be able to find the drivers on their website. First thing really is to try and identify the SCSI card.

Linux distributions tend to support SCSI drives very well, so you have a couple of options:

1. Find an alternative to Serato that will run under Linux - some suggestions here: https://alternativeto.net/software/s...platform=linux

2. Install Linux, then run Windows in a VM. Be prepared to spend a bit of time getting it to work, and be prepared for disappointment if it doesn't work quite as well as you hoped.

[scaryjim]

... As this is an older server, am i better installing a server version of windows?

I think more to the point you might be better off installing an older version of Windows rather than a server version, but as peterb says the first thing to do is get the details of the SCSI card, then hunt out drivers. The key for which OS to use is simply which one has a driver for the controller.

Dell do still have the spec sheet for the T110 on their website (https://www.dell.com/downloads/ap/pr...spec_sheet.pdf) which should give you some hints as to which controller you have. If you have one of the hardware RAID options I imagine you might need to set the RAID set up in the BIOS or RAID controller first? It shouldn't be too hard to dig up an online guide to setting everything up once you've worked out which controller it is, anyway

[Kumagoro]

If you haven't already have a look on FTP.dell.com

[Splash]

Easiest way is to goto https://dell.com/support and plonk in the Service Tag of the server - once you've done that you should be able to download the relevant drivers.

[deejayburnout]

Thanks for the pointer. i will have a go tomorrow at trying the link and see if i can get it working

[deejayburnout]

Ok. A bit of a head scratcher here.

I tried to install windows again so I could replicate the issues I was having and for some reason I was able to install windows fine. I couldn’t get it to do hardware raid, even following some Tips from forum posts from dell from 6 years ago.

Not sure what changed but now it has a fresh copy of windows 10 on it.

Serato is now up and running but cpu is running around 90% on all cores at 2.4ghz. It’s supposed to boost to 2.8ghz but that never happened.

I think i could do with sticking a dedicated gpu in it as serato needs at least 365mb of gpu mem and the T110 only has 8.

Joy

[Millennium]

You will likely need to get in the BIOS menu for the SCSI RAID adaptor at boot time to set up hardware raid. Please find out the make and model of the raid adaptor. Windows Device Manager may be able to help with this now it has the correct driver.

There may also exist software for windows to configure raid but it's not going to work if you're wanting to raid a drive you're booting the OS from.

I personally have no problem with Windows software raid in general though you can't boot from it.

Please consider the vertical height requirement when choosing a GPU. Many servers will only accept half height cards for example. Something like a 6970 level of card should be plenty. I don't know if those came half, height though, maybe not.

Good luck and interesting software!

[scaryjim]

... Serato is now up and running but cpu is running around 90% on all cores at 2.4ghz. It’s supposed to boost to 2.8ghz but that never happened. ...

The boost clock is for lightly threaded loads - if you were only using one or two cores you'd see the boost clock working. As you're loading all the cores it's going to be stuck at its base clock.

That said, the fact that you're only hitting ~ 90% load suggests that you wouldn't gain much from a faster CPU anyway (the tech specs reckon it only requires a 1GHz i3, assuming you're using the standard Serato DJ).

The 384MB video ram requirement only applies if you're using the Serato Video plugin to add visuals to your DJ sets (https://serato.com/dj/expand-your-setup/video) - if you're just using Serato DJ that's not required. Even if you are using Video, any discrete card should be fine for driving 2D visuals and I don't think you can buy a new GPU with < 512MB of VRAM nowadays. Just make sure you've got a spare PCIe slot for it, and as Millenium said check if you need a low profile card (there's plenty of low profile cards you there but they don't all come with low profile brackets - caveat emptor!).

[deejayburnout]

Thanks for the pointers. Will take that into account.

I was looking at gumtree and I can get a low profile gpu for £10.