PowerEdge 1800 RAID issue - Unable to detect HDs

Hi Josh,

I'm not sure what you mean? 

I didn't setup any Arrays at the moment, when I go into the utility at boot up I only see 2 HDs

Sata0 = 930GB

Sata1 = 930Gb

What about the other 5 drives? 

What do you mean 500GB? I cant use  1TB drives? 

Hi,

Are the drives in a single array? There is a 2TB limit for a virtual disk. However 1TB drives are not validated, the largest drives we shipped were 500GB.

Actually, 750GB were validated for the CERC, but 1TB were not.

The CERC is a very low-end controller and supports only 1.5Gbps speeds, among other limitations (disk size).

If being used in production, you should consider replacing the 1800.

So is the limitation on the Adaptec card itself or the motherboard ?

because when I plug 2 HDs to it, it detects them

but if i plug a third one, it will not see it.

if it is the card, which card should I get to see all HDs ?

thanks,

There are no good "supported" controllers for this server, which is why I recommended considering a new server. You could try a PERC 5/i. It is not guaranteed to work, but has the best chance of any unsupported/third-party controller of working and doing what you  need it to do. I still would recommend getting a new server. You can get a used 2900/2950 for VERY little these days and it will do what you need it to.

i dont get it. because i have another 1800 that have 5 + 1(OS) drives connected to it and working with no issues. same card same bios same everything.

but it looks like the drives were set as volumes in the raid utility, but in windows there set as dynamic and each one is 930gb RAID5. all drives combined to 1 around 4.5 TB. should i be looking for a special setting or jumpers ?

i can also see all drives in the other 1800 machine RAID utility. but not in this one !!  is there a way i can make windows see all the drives and maybe i can config RAID 5 inside windows ?

Can i use windows disk manager to do spanned on the drives ?

thanks

Can i use windows disk manager to do spanned on the drives ?

You "could", but don't.

There are different versions of the card and different firmware versions, but more than anything, they are very unpredictable when not using supported drives on them - very sensitive to the model, size, generation of SATA.