New life for old HP Z800

[Paolo58]

Found for very cheap a nice Z800. It's a v2 version cause the boot block is late 2009 and the original chip was an E5540.

Now it has a dual E5530 (couldn't find another 5540) and 64GB registered RAM total. Will go to 96GB soon, given the price of used DDR3 RAM pulled from retired servers... 

It boots Win11 rather quick, and performs well enough, using the original Quadro 1800 and a Samsung 850 Pro SATA SSD as boot disk.

I plan on using a couple more components to upgrade it on the cheap, squeezing as much performance as possible from this wonderfully built old system. 

Having no specific experience with Z800 workstations, I think I could benefit from a few advices from the more experienced users who have been so helpful to other Z800 novices.

Here are my questions. 

First, are better heatsinks a must, if I ever decide to go for a couple of X5660 or X5670 Xeons. I'm tempted, cause those CPUs can be found dirty cheap these days.

Second, considering that I don't play with 3D games, but I might decide to use Lightroom/plug-ins  on this machine, is the Quadro 1800 enough, or maybe it's best to look for a 5/6 years old gaming GPU?

I have no clue, cause I have been immersed in Mac world for more than a decade, so my perspective is very outdated (let's say, thinking of expandable machines, a Mac Pro 2010 feels kind of cutting edge to me!). Regarding the intended use of the computer, I want to have the option to use it as a Windows or Linux workstation, but it might just replace a decrepit machine running TrueNas (maybe switching to Unraid, and using one or two virtual machines). I don't think the GPU would play an important role in that case... 

Third, thinking of disabling the ROM of the on board LSI SAS controller and buying a cheap second hand SAS 2 (either 4 ports or 8 ports). The generation of the PCI-E interface might be a bottleneck, but I believe that a 6Gbps controller should make a difference (also allowing to use large SAS and SATA drives). At the moment the old LSI on-board pushes three 15000rpm drives in Raid0 at a very respectable pace... but the max size of the disks is a huge limiting factor. 

Last question, if I want a really fast boot/system drive, which is the best solution? I have already ordered a dirty cheap NVME to PCI-E adapter, just in case. Though I'm still undecided if I should first try to use software on a USB thumb drive (which would make up for the lack of a bios routine that allows to use an NVME as boot disk), or go for a simpler, more straightforward solution: a device with an Option ROM. Unfortunately all the older ones have huge bandwidth problems. Buying a second hand Samsung 950 Pro M.2 (with on-board OROM) on a "stupid" PCI-E adapter could be the best option. What do you think? 

I hope one of the experienced ones will take the time to write down a few advices. I did some homework but most of the info is outdated. 

Thanks in advance 

Paolo 

FIRST UPDATE 

The project I just started is already proving interesting. My Z800 now has an new/old 4-drives chassis (without backplane) that I fitted in place of the DVD and the two extra 5.25" bays 🙂 On the bottom of the case there are two SATA SSDs (that will be velcro'ed in place). The eleventh drive can be connected through the E-SATA port... I'm so happy I'm restoring some old server hardware to their former glory. All stuff I had lying around unused since loong ago. A couple of SAS disks have less than 200 hours of life. A pity I bricked one Maxtor/Seagate SATA HDD cause the firmware update app froze on me for no apparent reason. I had three of those low profile SATA 2 disks, all with around 100 hours of life. Two were left untouched, I would try any trick to revive the third. 

[DGroves]

from my personal experience with a z800 i recommend these items

the optional 1100 watt power supply is a must if using dual 130/150 watt cpu's

also the optional  463991-001performance heatsinks are required,

you can not use 3rd party heatsinks due to the design if this system only the HP units will fit

disabling the onboard LSI SAS/SATA device and rom then installing a adaptec 6805T card which supports Raid and JBOD (just a bunch of disks) is highly recommended, (make sure to get one that includes the cache/BBU module like in the link below) Note that you can use this card as a bootable device,

the Adaptec RAID 6805 can deliver up to 2 GB/s sustained data transfer rate to the host. Peak performance is up to 4.8GB/s through the SAS 2.0 interfaces and 4.0GB/s through the PCIe Gen2 host interface

https://www.ebay.com/itm/192408535132

you can also use SATA/SAS male to male adapters to connect this card to the four  internal Hotswap bays

https://www.amazon.com/Dalco-SATA-Cable-Coupler-Adapter/dp/B0033Z74L2

https://cpustuff.com/7-pin-male-male-sata-adapter-7male2m/

installing a USB card that actually can support the full usb 3.0 speeds is also useful, note that these cards are not the same as those cheap pci-e x1 usb 3.0 cards that when used in a older pci-e 2.0 system will fail to reach the stated 3.0 xfer speed 

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Express-SuperSpeed-Dedicated-Channels/dp/B00HJZEA2S

https://www.highpoint-tech.com/usb-catalog

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2553889.m570.l1313&_nkw=RocketU+1411&_sacat=0

and here's one i use for my front 5.25 hotswap bay which has two usb 3.1 ports

https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology-Internal-Connector-ReDriver/dp/B01MQUONVV

video: depends really on your needs and budget, 

the quadro P4000 for professional, or the GTX 1050 TI for consumer/ business

or the AMD Firepro W7000 card

i would also disable the onboard network boot roms (do not disable the nic's just the boot roms(s))

also you may find a internal 5.25 2.5/3.5 hotswap bay useful

sas/sata support:

https://www.amazon.com/ICY-DOCK-Tray-Less-Docking-Enclosure/dp/B07K8QRBVD/ref=pd_lpo_1?pd_rd_i=B07K8...

sata only:

https://www.amazon.com/Syba-SY-MRA55006-Mobile-Extra-Black/dp/B00834SJ8K/ref=pd_lpo_3?pd_rd_i=B00834...

a internal 5.25 combo card reader/optical drive unit can also be useful

https://www.ebay.com/itm/233959219821

The z800 in general does not support booting from NVME as it lacks the necessary bios code for this, there were a very very few SSD's that contained this code onboard the ssd bios like  the early data/enterprise pci-e NVME ssd (seagate warpdrive) or use a software based nvme boot loader to enable booting from current consumer nvme ssd's (duet/refind) however for most users a normal sata based SSD will be the easiest to setup and provide a major increase in speed

the z800 has a 3.8x limit on the size of a bootable drive (if running the latest bios for it). data drives can be 6/8TB with larger sizes possible as far as i know

feel free to PM me if you have any more questions