Supported disks, disk licensing, and cold spares for Dell PowerVault MD3600f?

Hey all -

Title pretty much says it all. I'm curious about a few things:

What size of disks are supported by this model? Do the disks have to have Dell firmware on them? Is there a list of supported part numbers?
Is disk capacity licensed by slot, or do we have all of the hardware disk slots available to us?
Would we be able to have an equivalent piece of hardware with an identical configuration, and in the event of an outage with our live hardware, we could simply flip the disks to the cold spare, boot it, and be back in business? Or is there licensing funny business that would prevent this?

tapelibraryfixer

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February 2nd, 2022 03:00

Master-None

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February 2nd, 2022 14:00

Wow, that's pretty helpful! We were looking at the Dell PowerVault MD3600f, is it possible to slot those 2.5" SSDs into it's 3.5" caddies and still have them hit the SAS/SATA connectors? I found these little guys on eBay, would they work?
Secondly, that document doesn't really tell me much about PowerVault and disk licensing or otherwise - will a second PowerVault of the same make/model and updated with the same firmware level suffice as a cold spare?
Third, it SEEMS like the answer is yes (as found in the MD3600f deployment guide), but is it possible to create RAID arrays with solid-state drives? I.e, we can use SSDs for more than simply an SSD cache, and present a fully SSD-based RAID array to our cluster via fiber channel, yes?

Master-None

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March 16th, 2023 12:00

As we have these in our possession now, I'm able to answer (for any potential future users):

Yes, though you do need an adapter such as this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W6PFNN6
Unsure about disk licensing, although we have a Dell PowerVault MD3600f with it's PowerVault MD1200 expansion enclosure with a total of 24 3.5" hot swap bays, and we are able to use all of them. I have seen nothing in the PowerVault Modular Disk Storage Manager software that implies that hot swap bays or disks are licensed, unlike with our previous Dell Compellent system. I have not tried third-party drives in it yet.
Yes, fully all-SSD arrays are possible.

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