HP Z800 with SSD

[M_Architect]

Dear @DGroves or other HP Z800 workstation experts!

I have an older HP Z800 Workstation, which I'd like to upgrade with a 1tb MX500 SSD. This drive should become a bootable OS (Windows 10 Pro x64) and programs dedicated drive. For data storage I have two SAS drives.

Connecting it to a SAS port gives me only 1.5 GB/s negotiated speed, which is strange, because an EVO860 (on another HP Z800) is working with 3.0 GB/s on SAS bus.

I grabbed a used LSI 9260 8i card, but figured that it doesn't work with passthrough mode. A RAID 0 configured single SSD on the LSI 9260 8i (with a weak BBU) gives me terrible write speeds (150MB/s). The read speed was above expectation (500+MB/s).

My final attempt was the MX500 on the first (blue) SATA port. The ROM says that this "drive is controlled by RAID BIOS" (probably the Intel controller this time) and the drive is on a 3.0 GB/s connection.

Questions - should I consider to upgrade the 9260 8i with a new BBU? Will that give me back the write back option and regain the write speeds or have I missed any other bottleneck RAID settings?

I think I can not switch the SATA RAID option off to be just AHCI (without RAID), so that above mentioned ROM message should be normal. Will that have any negative effect on speed? I probably have to find the correct Intel RST driver for it, any suggestion? Will the 12.9.4.1000 do the job?

Should I try another 6GB/s RAID card, which is passthrough capable or should I get a simple SATA3 PCIe card? As the PCIe is 2× only this will probably not give any serious speed advantage, or am I wrong? I guess a simple and working SSD upgrade would make enough difference.

Last question - new windows installation only or is there any way I could clone my existing system, which is on a SAS drive now? How do I persuade the HP Ztank that it should boot from a new cloned drive and not from the SAS disk? I tried before and the BIOS boot order change doesn't do the job.

Big thanks to anybody who might help me out here.

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

for a z800 i recommend a adaptec ASR-6950 raid card. this card unlike the LSI cards can do both JBOD and raid and uses a super cap instead of a battery. the card will give you SATA 6GBps speeds and you can boot off it, the only downside is that the JBOD is not passthrough, you must write a non std bootblock to the drive before using it in JBOD/Raid and this process is destructive (all data is erased) once this is done however the drive(s) will work in JBOD or raid  mode and you can disable the onboard LSI 3GBps controller in the z800 bios

the 6950 will support any SATA or SAS based 2.5/3.5 drive and allow larger capacity drives as a boot device if GPT is format is used you can also use the special cable HP made that allows you to connect 4 ports of this card directly to the 4 hot swap drive bays,

https://www.ebay.com/itm/For-HP-1ft-SFF-8087-483508-003-Z620-Z640-Z820-Z840-SATA-Cable-Cord-Replacem...

for the other 4 drive connections you need a SFF-8087 FORWARD TYPE to SAS/SATA cable

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-SAS-to-4-SATA-SFF-8087-Multi-Lane-Forward-Breakout-Internal-Cable-3-28...

you will need the win 7-10 driver from the adaptec site as the driver is not part of win 10

only other issue is that the adaptec driver for win 10 has a small bug that prevents the driver from loading the first time during the OS install (IE no drives found) workaround is to simply manually reload the driver a sec time and it will then be seen. this bug is documented in the adaptec  docs 

do not disable Raid+AHCI in the bios, this is the correct setting for max performance/compatibility

trying to install most SATA 3 cards on a pci-e 2.0 bus system is rather pointless as they were specced for a pci-e 3.0 bus which xfers data twice as fast as the 2.0 bus does

i do not recommend cloning drives, a clean install is best windows 10 will have all necessary drivers for a initial install of the z800 base hardware, only the intel RSTe driver ver 4.5/4.6 needs to be manually installed note that later releases of the RSTe driver no longer have support for the z800 c600 series chipset so do not use them

since you don't list the SAS drive's model number i can't say if they are 1.5/3/6 GBps based drives

for future proofing,.... the ASR-71605 card can be used it costs more but has true JBOD mode, (IE- drives from this controller will work on any other boards SATA port)

[M_Architect]

Thank you very much for given advice.

As this is my backup Workstation I will probably use the onboard SATA port for this SSD. The speed gain should be sufficient for what I need this workstation for.

One more question regarding the RST or RSTe driver, which I'll have to use for that. On websites here and here I've read some information about which driver would work best, but can't resolve which one is best for the ICH10R south bridge, which the HP Z800 uses.

The SAS drives present are two Hitachi HUS156030VLS600, which are SAS v2 - 6GB/s drives. As I want them to work in passthrough mode I'll keep them on the onboard SAS controller. The LSI 9260 8i would probably be quicker, but I'd had to move both of them into a RAID constellation. Well, this might still be an option, as this could work even without the BBU?

[DGroves]

the LSI 9260 8i without a working cache, due to the missing (expensive) battery is rather pointless for raid 0/1

and the cost of the battery usually is about the cost of a 6850 card/cache/battery combo

the LSI 9260 8i is just like the asr-6850 in that it also requires a destructive pre dos format that erases all data on the drives when you create the raid and the LSI 9260 8i will not do JBOD

you have no idea just how much faster a Mech drive(s) or SSD attached to the 6GBps 6850 can be it's well worth the 20.00 or so investment for your z800

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Adaptec-Raid-Controller-ASR-6805T-8-Ports-PCIE2-x8-512MB-BBU-Battery-AFM-60...

as i previously stated only the RST revisions 4.5.xxxx or the 4.6.xxxx are suitable for the z800 earler versions like the 4.3 are not windows 10 certified

https://drivers.softpedia.com/get/MOTHERBOARD/Intel/Intel-RSTe-AHCI-RAID-Driver-4-6-0-1085.shtml