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February 28th, 2014 03:00
MD1220 vs MD3220
Both of these are 24 drives 2U models using SAS connections. Can someone let me know what are the differences between them?
For Server Support, it's listed on the following page "Dell PowerEdge only" for the MD1220 and "Dell servers" for the MD3200. As long as we use a proper HBA (say LSI on a Super Micro head unit), why can't we connect to these boxes?
Also why would the 24 drives model do not support 4TB drives?
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DELL-Sam L
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February 28th, 2014 07:00
Hello titusc,
Let me clear up a few things for you. First off when using an MD1200 the Raid configuration is held on the controller card in the server & the drives in the MD1220. So if you were to get a MD1220 what dell would normally send is a PERC H800 which the PERC cards will only work in dell servers. Also you will use dell open mange server administrator to manage the MD1220.
When it comes to the MD3220 the raid configuration is held on the controllers in the MD3220 and also on the drives. Also you can use a 6GB sas card to connect to the MD3220 & don’t need to use a PERC card or any dell specific card if not going to be connecting to a dell server. Also you have a management software to manage it called MDSM (Modular Disk Storage Manger) that you can install on any windows or Linux host.
The MD3220 does support 4TB drives as long as the firmware is at 07.84.47.60. Here is a link to the support matrix and if you look on pages 11-14 it lists all supported hard drives. ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/Common/powervault-md3200_Concept%20Guide_en-us.pdf
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
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March 2nd, 2014 10:00
A different description:
The MD1200/1220 can be used in two ways:
- connected to a PERC H800/H810 in which case you cannot share the virtual disk with 2 or more servers (e.g. for a cluster), but you can split the enclosure to give half the enclosure to 2 different servers (each with their own H800/H810)
- connected to an MD3200/MD3220/MD3600/MD3620, in which case the MD3k-series unit contains the raid controllers and the servers use a SAS card, network card (for iSCSI) or fiber channel card to connect to the MD3k (the model determines what kind of connection the server has to use (no letter after the 4 digits = SAS, an 'i' after the 4 digits = iSCSI, and an 'F' after the 4 digits = fiber channel)
The MD3k is a SAN (storage area network), which allows servers to share disks, if they have a proper mechanism in place to do so safely (e.g. Microsoft Cluster Services, or the VMware VMFS filesystem).
Connecting the MD1k to a PERC is a DAS (Direct Attached Storage), which doesn't allow for shared storage, but is typically quite a bit less expensive.
Both options allow growing your virtual disks on the fly (with certain limitations), and re-assigning the storage to another server is also fairly easy (though this may require downtime).