PowerEdge T300 - 4x 2TB SATA drive support?

As to why Dell charges so much for the drive is hard to say, but you don't have to buy it from them.  For example:

$728 from Dell.com - 2TB SATA, part number 341-9723

$550 from ServerSupply.com - 2TB SATA, part number 341-9723

Sure you can get a 2TB drive, acceptable for home computers for $160, but they are not typically acceptable for use in servers.  It is important to put Enterprise-class hard drives in your server, specifically Dell-branded drives, which have a firmware loaded on them to work seamlessly with Dell controllers.  Non-Dell drives may not properly respond to commands and queries from the Dell controllers, and non-Enterprise-class drives are not reliable enough for Enterprise workloads.

Buy the right drives, but you don't have to pay Dell's premium for it ... shop around for the best price.  (Dell is not always so over-priced ... they are sometimes lower than others, but not always.)

Tia...

Hope you realise the amount of time SATA (vs SAS) drives take to rebuild...think long before going SATA .

To add to what the others said; the PERC6i has no problem accepting 2TB drives, but the T300 cannot boot from a (virtual) disk over 2TB (2048GB) in size. So, unless you have some other drive(s) to boot off of, you'll have to carve the raid set into 2 virtual disks; e.g. 100GB for a boot disk, and the rest for a datadisk. This does have 1 other drawback; you'll never be able to extend the raid set to add drives as the PERC6i cannot extend a raid set if there is more than 1 virtual disk on the raid set.

Thanks for the replies, fortunately SATA speed isn't a real concern as it's a 'cheap' media store / test server.

My main query is will WD Caviar Blacks or the slightly more expensive RE4 drives work as expected? The existing drives are WD RE3's just Dell branded so is there anything significant about firmware or any real differences in the drive build over standard WD's?

The server will boot ESX4i off a small USB drive installed on the internal USB port so the PERC6i itself I was ideally going to set as one large 6TB store for VM to make use of.

Again appreciate the fast responses, TIA

The RE4 and RE3 are both Enterprise-class drives, so they are acceptable for server use.  The Dell-branded/Certified drives will have different firmware from the "generic" or "retail" drives to enable them to work with the controller.  Non-Dell drives "may" work without problems, but there are certain commands they will not understand - this "misunderstanding" may cause problems, or it may not matter.  This is apparent when looking through controller logs.  But, if you have problems and you call Dell, they cannot guarantee proper operation of their hardware if you are not using Certified drives.  This does not void your warranty but can limit it.  You could always call Dell to see if they have a list of RE4 drive part numbers that would work. 

I was ideally going to set as one large 6TB store for VM to make use of.

This won't work. As you've probably read in the "Configuration Maximums pdf" from VMware, ESX/ESXi is limited to being able to use (virtual) disks of up to "2TB minus 512 bytes" (see page 1). So, you'll need to carve your raid set into multiple virtual disks of 2047GB or so, and this means (like previously mentioned) you won't be able to expand by adding more drives to the raid set in the future (you'd be able to add more drives and make them their own raid set though).

Apologies, it looks like I've misunderstood the VMFS limitations. So if I understand correctly although I can create a 64TB datastore I would need to create 3x 2TB volumes out of a physical 4x 2TB drives in a RAID5. These 2TB volumes I can then add as LUN's to the Datastore?

That is correct, however, I normally recommend not to tie them together (just because you can, doesn't mean you should).

A VM is also limited to getting at the max a disk of "2TB minus 512 bytes". So, why not just keep them 3 different datastores and split your VMs between them?

Hi Holydorf,

Did you get your RAID configured and working? It's just that I have a similar config to you which I can't get working correctly.

I'm using a brand new Dell T410 with Perc 6/i and 3x2TB SATA drives (Western Digital). I can create as many RAID5 virtual disks as I want in the Perc bios setup but as soon as I reboot, I get an error about one of the virtual disks being missing. If I create one big virtual disk then that works fine. Unfortunately, as with yourself, I'm using ESXi which won't recognise more than 2TB chunks, so I'd need to create more than one virtual disk - which it doesn't seem able to remember creating!

Any clues would help...
Thanks,
Andy.

Hi I have a similar question with the use of a T300 as a low cost store mine though is non raid using three additional drives as descrete storage units.

To the OP

How did you get on?