Help with PowerEdge 1950 HDD upgrade to SSD

Thanks again, my last question:

"If you don't use disks certified for the PERC 6, then you may have several issues with them, but using third-party enterprise disks, you might be ok"

What types of issues I might run into, are they obvious issues from the start or unpredictable issues that might happen after a while because of incompatibility?

Thanks for the quick reply. 

How can I be sure if a certain SSD is certified for PERC 6?

Also, Does Dell have an installation service for this that can charge us and do this replacement for us? I am talking about the labor.

Thanks

SSD drives were introduced late in the life of the 1950/2950 life. One SSD drive was certified to run on these servers.

TheFlash1932 is correct, third party drives may throw errors in OpenManage and specific lights may not function due to firmware issues.  The drives themselves may function flawlessly.  Just be aware of  some of the drawbacks when using third party drives; enterprise class or otherwise. 

Regards,

Thanks you so much with all your help.

It was very frustrating to chat and talk with the sales and support team but I have to say I am very pleased with your help in this forum.

Random, unpredictable issues ... some actually randomly fall offline (rather than the fake failure of the LED), some refuse to be configured, etc.  You might search the forum for your specific SSD of choice ... some work better than others (trial and error on users' parts).

Thanks Geoff ... I wasn't aware there were any validated for the 1950.

The difference between those who work in support and those who work in the real world (I don't work for Dell).  "Most" Dell support agents are pretty good ... those that participate here on the forums are pretty top notch.

I was asking the same question and I managed to dig up a certified list of drives...hope this helps you.

I was under the impression that you COULD have a traditional SAS drive, an SATA (tunnelled by PERC7 controller), as well as an SSD SATA or SAS interface (now both available, but you have to look real hard below;) all on the same controller, individually, but not Raided. You may ask for verification on this as it makes your transition much easier. These aren't cheap matey....maybe one day...

In any case here are the SSD drives from Dell, both SATA and SAS interfaces.

Dell Certified SSD's for RAID

It's possible these drives may not be suitable for use attached to a hardware RAID controller. Dell's officially supported SSDs include the following part numbers/descriptions:

342-3350 100GB Solid State Drive SATA Value MLC 3Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive-Limited Warranty,CusKit

342-3351 100GB Solid State Drive SATA Value MLC 3Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive,3.5in HYB CARR-Limited Warranty,CusKit

342-5631 200GB Solid State Drive SAS Value SLC 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive,CusKit

342-5633 200GB Solid State Drive SAS Value SLC 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive,3.5in HYB CARR,CusKit

342-3356 200GB Solid State Drive SATA Value MLC 3Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive-Limited Warranty,CusKit

342-3357 200GB Solid State Drive SATA Value MLC 3Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive,3.5in HYB CARR-Limited Warranty,CusKit

342-5636 400GB Solid State Drive SAS Value SLC 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive,CusKit

342-5638 400GB Solid State Drive SAS Value SLC 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive,3.5in HYB CARR,CusKit

342-5817 400GB Solid State Drive SATA Value MLC 3Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive-Limited Warranty,CusKit

342-5821 800GB Solid State Drive SATA Value MLC 3Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive-Limited Warranty,CusKit

342-5823 800GB Solid State Drive SATA Value MLC 3Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive,3.5in HYB CARR-Limited Warranty,CusKit

Other than the non-certified drives I don't see any outstanding problems with your configuration. Non-certified drives are not necessarily problematic but from your logs nothing appears wrong so that is where I would look. So my next suggestion would be to see if the drive manufacturer has any recommendation about the configuration. Plextor's support email is at <www.plextor-digital.com/.../support.html>. Let me know if you need more information about the controller or if you learn anything interesting from Plextor.

"I was under the impression that you COULD have a traditional SAS drive, an SATA (tunnelled by PERC7 controller), as well as an SSD SATA or SAS interface (now both available, but you have to look real hard below;) all on the same controller, individually, but not Raided."

They can be mixed on the controller AND in RAID together, but they cannot be mixed in a RAID array.  For example, you can have:

RAID 1 - 2xSATA-SSD
RAID 5 - 4xSATA-HDD
RAID 1 - 2xSAS-HDD

But you can't put a SAS and a SATA drive in an array together (not sure why you would want to, except for migrating from one to another - next), and you can't put a SATA-SSD and a SATA-HDD in an array together, which is what you would have if you tried to go from an HDD array to an SSD array by rebuilding drives one at a time.  I don't know if this was his goal or not, but I thought it would be worth mentioning, not knowing what he meant by emphasizing "REPLACE" -ing the disks.

That's interesting Flash1932...

So, if i wanted to move from a SAS Raid1 to an SSD Raid1?

Could one use Ghost to image the new the new SSD, then Raid1 the SSD's?

(I used to use Ghost a lot when it initially came out and it seems to really Ghost anything it could see (or try to), but it seems to be a little restricted now)

Thoughts?

"Could one use Ghost to image the new the new SSD, then Raid1 the SSD's?"

Yes, because you would need to set the SSD up as a separate array - a single-disk RAID 0 - which could be converted to a 2-disk RAID 1 on the fly.  (If you have the disk slots to spare, you could clone directly to the SSD's in a RAID 1 without having to reconfigure from 0 to 1 later.)

I've never been a fan or user of "ghost", but anything that can copy/clone a disk/partition should work in this scenario.