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Dell PowerEdge R710 Raid card upgrade to Perc H710
Hello, I am trying to upgrade the Raid card in my PowerEdge R710 (Perc 6/i) and I am interested in going to a Perc H710 raid card but im wondering if it will work with the older backplane. the reason for the upgrade is because I want to run 4TB+ HDDs and the current Perc 6/i will only see up to 2TB. I know I could upgrade to the Perc H700 but I have heard that it has the same limitation and only supports up to 2TB as well.
Dell-DylanJ
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2.9K Posts
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April 5th, 2019 08:00
The H710 controller wasn't tested in the 11G server family, so I can't speak to whether or not it will work there. However, the connectors appear to be the same, and both should be a 6Gbps SAS connection, I don't believe 12Gbps SAS was introduced until the 13G. All that to say that I don't think that backplane and controller communication will be a problem, but controller and the rest of the system may be.
As for the PERC 6i and the H700, as far as I am aware, the PERC 6i doesn't support drives above 2TB, but the H700 should. I am going back through documentation to see if anything indicates that statement is incorrect, and I'll edit my post, if that's the case.
D7rkN1ghtmare
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April 5th, 2019 10:00
Just did some digging and found that the H700 does support 2TB+ drives so I just ordered one and a new set of sas cables to go with it. Thanks again.
RevBaker
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April 5th, 2019 18:00
I'd be interested to know how this went for you. Recently acquired an R710 and the 6i was installed. Got the H700 and had a bit of a problem getting it going.
The very first issue was a boot halt that said the H700 installed in the integrated controller slot expected PCIe lane width of 4x but only saw 2x. No boot. I suspect this may be a player but have never seen anyone mention it....
"The two PowerEdge R710 PCI Express risers provide up to four expansion slots and one internal slot
as follows:
• Two x8 and two x4 PCI Express Gen2 slots, connected to the IOH
• One x4 PCI Express Gen1 slot for internal storage, connected to the IOH"
Source Dell's TECHNICAL GUIDEBOOK, INSIDE THE POWEREDGE R710
The Dell H700 guide says:
"The PERC H700 Integrated card with two x4 internal mini-SAS ports supports the PCIe 2.0 x8
host interface."
So, placed the H700 in Riser 2 and was then seen as acceptable lane width to boot ( my backplane connectors were long enough but had to relocate the battery and associated cable). An inspection with lspci confirmed that the slot was 8x but the card only negotiated a 4x PCIe lane width. All BIOS and other firmware in the system were the latest available. At least up and running.
Fast forward to creating arrays. 3 HGST 3TB SAS drives in a RAID5, using background consistency check as initiated from the H700 BIOS, would have taken 9 days to complete. Whoa! So, more research....
Installed MegaRAID Storage Manager v15.03.01.00 (Avago) on a Ubuntu Server 4.15.0-46-generic to manage the RAID arrays and get a bit more control over the H700 (if you're really brave you can poke around with MegaCli64 and do some neat things, as I have, but I'd recommend not). Found out that if you killed the background consistency check and initiated a foreground consistency check via the MANAGE/INITIALIZE selection the times come down to a much more reasonable hours instead of days. The PROGRESS panel even shows elapsed/time-to-go vice just the percentage given by the H700 BIOS.
Wish you luck!