Maximum Hard Drive capacity for Dell PowerEdge r720xd

Pwilson82,

The largest drive I see available for the R720xd is 10TB, so there is room to upgrade the drives. There isn't actually a capacity cap on the server, the limitations are generally amount of Virtual Disks you can create, as well as slots available for drives.

Let me know if this helps, or if you are looking for additional details.

Now to clarify, are you wanting to upgrade the drives for the current configuration while maintaining the data, or are you wanting to just recreate the Virtual Disk with the new drives? If you are wanting to upgrade the VD with the new drives it would be using Online Capacity Expansion Replace Member feature, where as the other is just deleting and recreating the Virtual DIsk with the new drives. 

Before doing wither I would make very sure you have a complete backup. 

You can read about the options here. 

Also, could these upgraded be integrated into RAID? We are currently running Windows Server 2012 R2 as the native operating system as it is a backup server, not a VMWare host.We're currently using all 12 slots.

Chris. Thank you. Is there a certain order in which these need upgraded (such as per slot)? 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the 12 slots all that's available on this model? If that's the case then I would assume we would be doing the option of Deleting and Recreating the Virtual Disk?

It looks like I would want to do the Replace Member option. Could we get by with only replacing one or two of the individual disks with a 10TB disk?

Both are an option as the Replace Member option would be individually replacing each existing drives with larger ones, or the other is as you said just deleting and recreating with the larger drives. So the Replace Member of the Online Capacity Expansion is still an option. 

You wouldn't be able to replace just a couple, in order to expand the virtual disk, you would need to replace all the drives with larger drives using Replace Member and then once completed then you can expand the virtual disk with that space. If you were to just replace a couple drives it would just show the larger drive as the size of the original drive to maintain continuity of the Virtual Disk. Essentially using a 10tb drive as a 1tb drive, with none of the benifits of the additional space.

On a side note, with your original question, I was assuming you were asking if there were larger drives, and their size capacity. I only listed the 10Tb as it was the largest drive I saw us offering. There are other drives smaller that 10TB and still larger than 1TB. 

Ok, so looking in the iDrac, it's showing me that I have 12 3.5 inch drives being used. I'm assuming that means I'm out of available slots, so I would need to replace all of them to upgrade my storage?

Yes you would. Another option I just remembered is the rear backplane, seen on page 108 here. The R720xd supports the twelve 3.5in drive in front and optionally, with additional hardware, two 2.5in drives in the rear. 

So if I add two more disks in the backplane, I would just use the Online Capacity Expansion method?

The 2 drives in the rear you can try adding to the existing Virtual disk, but they would need to be the same size and speed or faster/larger, as well as the same SAS/SATA/SSD.

We have this server too and it works great. I was wondering if we could replace one of the existing 3.5" hard disks on the front with a 2.5" SSD. We have a caddy holder that supports a 2.5" drive in a 3.5 tray.

We did a quick experiment but the lights on the front of the tray did not light up and it did not show up in the list of drives. Is there something we need to configure in advance? Thanks.

Hi @LukeChung,

It sounds like incompatibility issue. It's not that the server is not able to support SSD, but it's more towards Dell brand drive. Is the drive you're replacing with a Dell brand? Do you have the Dell PN# for us to check compatibility? Have you tried updating the server's firmware and BIOS? You mentioned it didnot show up in the list of drive, where was it? iDRAC? RAID BIOS?

Thank you for your help. We had a caddy with an interface to convert the 2.5" to 3.5" size. Eliminating that interface and connecting the SSD directly to the Dell worked. The light turned yellow after it was seated. Configuring the BIOS to create a new Virtual Disk for it let us configure it as a mountpoint. Thanks!

We're now looking to replace some of our 4TB HDD with 12 TB HDD, then opening some more drives for SSD.