Dell R620 | PERC H710 Mini (Embedded) | Integrated RAID Controller 1

On your server physical disks are connected to the H710 Mini controller. So when you disable RAID controller server will not be able to access/show physical disks. Can you give more details on 40GB disk space you mentioned on the post. If you need to utilize all pace on physical disk then you can create RAID 0 where all space of the physical disk can be utilized. You can either create sperate RAID 0 of each individual physical disks or one RAID 0 of all physical disks combined. Please note once you create RAID 0 there is no redundancy and data will be lost when any of the drives are failed.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, sorry I received notification of this reply just today.

The server came with RAID5 configured, I formatted the disk using windows but that did not help recover the 40GB disk space, I also created RAID0 but could not recover the 40GB disk space.

Not sure what else to do.

Thank You

Hello,

The drives in the backplane are being controlled by the H710. Likely, the BIOS setting you are referring to is the one that controls the onboard controller. If you want to not use the H710, I'd have to recommend either replacing the H710 with an H310 and setting the H310 to passthrough mode, or moving the cable to leverage the onboard controller and removing the H710. 

Shine may have other thoughts, but my recommendation would be to use an H310 with passthrough mode enabled. The H710 doesn't have a passthrough mode, unfortunately. 

Thanks for clarifying further.

Sorry I failed to understand the below. 

"moving the cable to leverage the onboard controller and removing the H710"

Does this by any chance mean that its possible to remove the H710 and use them disks without any RAID controller.

Hi,

That would be possible, but you may need to replace the H710 cabling to S110 cabling, though we may need to verify the hardware if it's possible, as you did not mention anything about the drive configuration of your server. 

Mentioning about the 40GB, can you elaborate more about it? You said about creating RAID0 and not able to recover 40GB? Could you take some pictures of what you're trying to achieve? 

Hi,

Thanks for replying back.

I have attached the images of the physical connection.

And sorry about the size as I was under the impression it was a 1.2TB but its 1TB, so I'm taking 931 is the actual usable size.

The drives are configured as RAID0 (each individual disk), how to know if RAID cable can be replaced with a Non-RAID one.

In order to use the embedded S110 controller you would need to swap the backplane cable with part number PD91Y, which is the cable that runs from the backplane to board. 

Let me know if this helps.

Hi, 

Thanks all for the help. 

Can I do vSAN with the existing cable and RAID0 per disk setup ?

I have been reading and it seems possible with RAID0. 

Hi, as I see I can't find PERC S110 in vSAN compatibility list.https://dell.to/362eVDf but could it be as you said still I was not sure. It would be very helpful if someone in the community shares their experience on this topic.

Can someone confirm if vSAN will work with RAID0 configuration or is it related to the cable as well.

It does support Raid 0, but it has to be that each drive is its own raid 0, so if you have 3 drives then it would have to be 3 raid 0's.

Thanks,

I have configured each drive with its own RAID0, no other configurations needed on the controller ?

Hi,

I'm not very verse in vSAN, but I found an old post https://dell.to/3l0VEX2 about the VD settings that needed to be set on, try on it. I do remember that H710 is not recommended to be used in vSAN environment.

Do let us know if you manage to install vSAN and run it with no issues.

Thanks.. 

The vSAN list has H710 Mini being supported on SAS-RAID. 

Anyone else having any other thought..