Internal Hard Drive inside Dell PowerEdge R710

Hello.

How would I go about installing an internal hard drive, preferably an SSD, inside the R710. I know it has a spare SATA Data port but I cant seem to see any spare power cables or molex cables like there is in the 2950 Gen 3 that I have.

I am not quite sure whether I have got you well. The server comes with a backplane and the hard drives are hot swap. They are installed into the drive bays using either 2.5" or 3.5" carriers depending on the backplane configuration. To use SSD, you require either PERC 6/i or H700 controller.

What I was trying to ask (terrible explanation by me lol) was is there a way to put an SSD inside the server as in under the chassis cover and leave the front 6 drive bays (3.5inch HDD Model) for 4TB WD Red drives for media.

The server has a H700 so no worries about drive compatibility. I just wondered if there was a way to have (technically 7 hard drives). 1 SSD inside under the chassis cover and the 6 hotswap in the front as this would then allow me to have 6 4TB WD Red in Raid 5.

Apologies for the awful explanation lol.

Thanks,

Arron

Thank you for that!

I will try and get my hands on one and try it out!

Thanks,

Arron

Where can the GP700 be purchased?

TIA

How did this work out for you? We're facing a similar need. Please take a moment to let us know.

I'm looking to do the same thing.  Have R710 with PERC 700 and 6 hard drive RAID.  Instead of replacing 1 or 2 hard drives with SSD's, would prefer to add in internet SSD using the free SATA.  Is there a list of compatible SSD drives ?  Also, using UBUNTU 20.04.

Thanks.

Hello sscotti,

The system will support PCIe, SATA and SAS SSD drive:

Example-

1XF66 -Controller Card, SSD Controller, 1.21TB, PCIe, Half Height Half Length

9T0ND -SSD, 800GB, SATA, 2.5 inch

DPF1J  -SSD, 800GB, SAS, 2.5 inch

If your drive bays are 2.5" then you will need a drive with carrier.

If your drive bays are 3.5" you'll need the drive, carrier and adapter 2.5" to 3.5".

(The carriers and adapter are only available from Dell as a customer kit option with drive purchase)

Sales could quote you other capacities if needed and ask for customer kit to include carrier/adapter.

I hope this helps.

Seems like there would be less expensive options.  There are four PCI 2.0 slots.  It would probably be an unsupported solution, but there must be a way to use either those or the vacant or used SATA slots to support one of the. many inexpensive SSD drives that are available.  I'd rather use one of those slots (the PCI) than one of the drive bays.

Hi,

Dell -Charles R did mention about PCIe SSD. Though, it would not be possible if you're looking into using the onboard SATA. As the system is only configured to use either the RAID controllers, simultaneous usage is not possible. Some users successfully use M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe adapter, but it's not a verified test hardware on R710, so I would not be able to provide a solid answer that it would definitely work.

Thanks.  The server is just a server that I use at home for development, not a production server.  If it is possible to pull out the PERC and then just mount drives as individual drives (are those still SATA), or then get a PCIe card with an SSD.  Just looking for options.  I really don't need the RAID.  I would be happy with 2 1TB SSD's, one for the sytem and one for a backup.  I could use some of the existing HDD for long-term backup and data.

Lastly, the performance seems a little pokey compared to my iMac.  I am using GNOME Desktop manager on the server as well, for convenience sometimes.  In the future would probably just manage by FTP and SSH.  Would adding a better graphics card and the SSD make it more useable as far as the GUI is concerned ?

Hello,

If you're able to get a GPU functioning, then I'd expect that it would likely help. However, there are no GPUs that I could recommend trying and none were validated for use with the model. I've seen far more issues with using video cards, than I have successes. As far as an SSD improving GUI performance, I doubt it. It might feel like it because your file manager will access data more quickly, but the only difference I'd expect to see is in the time it takes to load.

One issue you'll run into adding a GPU is power. I'd make sure to look at only low power cards that will be able to satisfy their power requirements from just the PCI connector, because there wouldn't be an auxiliary power cable you could use to power the card.

Hi, Would this cable work for R810 as well?  Where can it be purchased?

Thanks

Hello, thanks for choosing Dell, could you state your issues one more time here in detail once again? Did you mean to install a GPU card?