Troubleshooting Hard Drives and RAID in Dell Precisions

This post is intended to help Community users to troubleshoot issues  with their RAID arrays and Hard Drives on Precision systems. It will provide some videos and links to popular troubleshooting articles that can help solve the issues that users can experience.

RAID and Hard Drives are a popular topic and we hear a lot of questions about these all the time. So lets focus on these to begin with.

A very popular query we are asked a lot is "How many drives are supported in (system X)?" There's a very in-depth knowledge base article that details each Hard Drive configuration, RAID types and RAID levels for the Precision desktop systems going back to our Tx500 models. Click this link and if you still have Hard Drive config questions ask it below

RAID arrays can be complicated, so when they fail you can be lost in how to troubleshoot and get the array back up. We've created an article that has over 20 different RAID failure scenarios and how to resolve them. There should be an answer any of your RAID failure problems in there, but if there's not just ask.

Reinstalling the Operating system on a Precision can also be difficult at times due to the SAS, PERC cards and various other expansion cards and configurations available. For instance some models require pre OS drivers and others can give what look like strange errors. This article is specifically for all the various issues that can be seen when installing the Operating System, so bookmark it for when you need it 

Another popular query is how to add Hard Drives to various systems. Watch this video to see how it's done on the 7920

 If you would like to add any comments or are having issues with your Precision system not covered here, please use the comments below