Enterprise SAS SSD vs Consumer SSD

 The time was allocated to do a quick test to compare consumer grade SATA SSD drives to Enterprise grad SAS drives.   The SAS drives are 12Gbps, the SAS card is also 12Gbps.  The tests were done on the same Windows 10 desktop with the same LSI SAS card, expect where noted a PowerEdge r730 was used.

Baseline...Samsung Evo 840 1tb SSD on 12gb SAS controller, Windows 10

Samsung MZL1ls960 960gb SAS on 12gb SAS controller, Windows 10

Samsung MZL1ls960 960gb SAS on 12gb SAS controller, on Dell r730 PowerEdge on Perc H730 RAID card w/ 1gb cache, test set to 2gb, Windows Server 2019

Dell MZ-1LT3T8c 3.8tb SAS on 12gb SAS controller, Windows 10

Impressive results!  12gb SAS SSD drives are very near NVMe performance, and nearly double that of the SATA drives.  Is the performance due to having more cache?  Or is it because the SAS drives are 12Gbps vs 6Gbps on the SATA drives?  It should be noted that during testing the SAS drives consume roughly 2 more watts at idle 5 more watts during the test.   The SAS drives were also MUCH warmer to touch where the SAS drives were ambient temperature. 

Dell x30 PowerEdge Servers running NVMe

 I always assumed that generation 13 PowerEdge Server (r430, 530, 630, 730, 930 etc.)  where not able to run NVMe natively.  Many people run the M.2 "gum-stick" form factor drives on PCIe->NVMe adapter cards. 

As it turns out one can!   The parts are not cheap, but it basically a special PCIe controller card (Dell P31H2 16 Port PCIe x16 Extender SSD NVME Controller), SAS cables, and a special back plane.  The PCIe card runs four cables out to "special-ish" ports on the back plane, and four of the 2.5" drive bays can now run U.2 NVMe drives.

Windows 11 & Hardware

 Windows 11 has several hardware requirements that if they are not met, one cannot install the operating system.   Or can you? 

  
Windows 11 requires the following minimum requirements:

-TPM 2.0 modules (Trusted Platform Module (encryption))

-1ghz 64bit CPU

-64gb hard drive

-4gb RAM

-Graphics card compatible w/ DirectX12 and WDDM 

-720p or better display

Seems more than reasonable, except, the real bugger for most of this is the TPM part.  That rules out basically any machine that is older an Intel I-series generation 8.   So let's say one has a computer with an Intel i7-7700? Let's say one has a Dell PowerEdge r640 server running VMware ESXI v7 with Intel Xeon 414r CPU's?  Well those machines are more than fast enough, but they doesn't pass the TPM check; so Microsoft says: "Go pound sand, and then go buy a new PC.  Also what if one is doing virtualization?    

Well on can bypass this hardware check. There is no downside to this; the machine will run Windows 11 without problems.  It isn't going to BlueScreen, it isn't going to be slow, it isn't going to blow up; well at least not because of pseudo hardware requirements.  I have done it probably a dozen of times and have yet to run into any issues related to the hardware requirements.  One machine has even been running for since early 2022.

After booting to the Win11 ISO, at the very first screen where it asks about Language, time/currency, and Keyboard.  Hit "shift" and "F10".  This will bring up a Command Prompt.  

In that Command Prompt window, type: "regedit"

In RegEdit,navigate to : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup

Create a new key named: "LabConfig"

In LabConfig create the following keys of DWORD value set to "1"

-BypassCPUCheck

-BypassRAMCheck

-BypassSecureBootCheck

-BypassTPMCheck

Close the Regedit and Command Prompt windows and install Windows as normal.  

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement

Bonus:  If one is using a USB key to install Windows, make the changes, and those settings will stick on the install media, as it is "writeable".  So one only has to do these steps once.

Bonus #2: If one doesn't want to deal with associating the machine to a Online Microsoft Account, simply don't have the machine connected to the internet until one is done installing Windows.  In other words; don't connect it to the internet until after setup is complete.