HD Sata - MD1000

What are you connecting the MD1000 to? If it's connected to a PERC5E or PERC6E, non-Dell drives will work, but you'd need the carrier for the drives. Dell doesn't sell these (w/o buying the whole harddrive from them), but they can be found on Ebay or so.

If you are connecting the MD1000 to an MD3000 or MD3000i, only Dell certified drives (Dell sells them as PowerEdge/PowerVault drives) will work in the MD1000, as the MD3000/i's raid controllers will not work with non-Dell drives.

Hi Guys,

I know this post is almost 1-Year old, but I am facing a similar situation:

• PE1950 with PERC 6/e. All firmware/BIOS are up to date.
• MD1000 with 4 SAS drives, non-split configuration, firmware up to date.

I added a single SATA drive (WD 1TB "Black" edition) to the enclosure. At first, nothing happened. After two minutes or so, the enclosure's blue LED indicator turned orange. In the Openmanage Alert Log I get:

"Controller event log: Enclosure PD 19(c 0/p0) phy bad for slot 5: Controller 1 (PERC 6/E Adapter)"

For testing purposes, I installed the drive in a PE2950 which had 2 free slots in its backplane, and the drive showed up in Server Manager immediately as "Ready".

Is there a solution to this problem?...

Did the 2950 have SATA drives in it or SAS drives?

Mixing SAS and SATA drives may require the SATA drives to have interposer boards.

SAS drives are dual ported; they can talk to the controller via 2 different channels (that often go across a single cable). SATA drives don't have this feature; they are single ported (desktops and laptops aren't built for redundancy (other then offering basic raid)). It's possible that when you're mixing drive types, the controller wants to talk via 2 channels to every single drive. The interposer board gives the controller 2 channels to talk to and then dumbs it down to a single channel for the drive side.

The 2950 is a SAS only server... is it possible that the 2950's backplane knows how to deal with this configuration, while the MD1000 requires an interposer board?

Will it help if I get another SAS cable and change the MD1000 configuration to split-mode, then install the SATA drive separated from the SASs, or is this an adapter issue that cannot be overridden?

The 2nd cable wouldn't make a difference for this issue I suspect. Though with the PERC6E and an up to date firmware (6.1 and later if memory serves), the 2nd cable (leaving the unit in unified mode) does give you redundancy (cable/EMM/PERC-port) and more bandwidth.

It is surprising, the lack of information from Dell available on this subject.  I have been working on a different problem involving the MD1000 and interposer boards.  As related to the MD1000, from what I gather, the interposer board’s only purpose is to allow an SATA drive to work in a configuration with dual EMMs.  A second cable does not affect this, but switching the MD1000 to split mode does isolate each drive port to a single EMM.  It should not matter if you have both SAS and SATA drives on the same half of the MD1000.  Remember the MD1000 keeps the mode it was powered on with, power off when switching modes.  Please share any results, there seems to be a lot of people trying to figure out this beast.

Hi Dave,

I tried everything, including split mode with every possible combination, but couldn't get it to work.

Ended up ordering an interposer board from Ebay, and now everything is in order...