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R630, H730 RAID controller, and using all 10 drives in 10-bay chassis
Hi. We're looking into purchasing our first Dell server, a R630, for virtualization. There's newer but this is sufficient for our needs. The datasheet for the H730 RAID controller says it supports "eight internal ports". According to the datasheet, two internal HD Mini-SAS SFF8643 connectors are used, with 4x SATA connectors each. So, it seems you can only connect 8 internal drives using this controller. So, how does this affect the 10-bay chassis. Can we create one or two RAID arrays with 10 2.5" drives? Or are we limited to 8 2.5" drives?
DiegoLopez
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July 7th, 2020 02:00
Hello @twwlogin,
Nice work from your side! It is exactly as you said. The cabling goes from either the SAS Connectors on the System Board (A and B) to the SAS Backplane in the 2.5” (x8) configuration or from the SAS connectors on the Integrated Storage Controller Card to the SAS Backplane Expander Card in the 2.5” (x10) configuration.
For the 1.8” (x24) the cabling goes from the Integrated Storage Controller Card and the SAS Connectors (A and B) on System Board to the SAS Backplane Expander Card AND from the SD Signal Cable Connector in the System Board to the SAS Backplane.
So, to summarize it supports up to 24 x 1.8” HDD or 10 x 2.5” HDD or 8 x 2.5” HDD. You can have around 5 "from factory" storage options. And, please, note I used the term "from factory" because the chassis option must be selected at the point of purchase and cannot be changed or upgraded later.
Here you can find all the 5 options:
Hope this helps.
Regards.
twwlogin
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July 4th, 2020 12:00
So, looking at the R630 owner's manual (p147), I think I found the solution. The 10-bay chassis has a x10 backplane with a SAS expander. The PERC RAID controller connects to this SAS expander rather than to the drives directly or a passthrough backplane. Something similar is done with the x8 backplane and the x24 backplane.