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32423
April 19th, 2015 05:00
MD3000 and Seagate Drives
I needed to replace some of the drivers on my MD3000 so I looked up the list of certified drivers and ordered based on it. My old drivers were Seagate ST3300657SS (SAS) but also marked as Dell and the new drives I purchased are Seagate Cheetah 15K (SAS) ST3300657SS.
My MD is reporting that the new drivers are uncertified. The only difference between the old and the new is the firmware version old is ES62 and the new ones are 0008. Is there a way to get my new drives recognized and functional? I have purchased 10 and would hate they go to waste just because the documentation is incomplete.
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DELL-Daniel Ca
243 Posts
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April 20th, 2015 11:00
Hello, Riomaha.
I'd like to know where you purchased these drives. If they have a Dell Logo on them, then they're "Dell Certified Drives". Unfortunately, if they do not have that logo on them, they're simply not going to work.
It's not a matter of documentation, it's a matter of the chips on the disk.
Here's a link to our MD3000 support matrix: downloads.dell.com/.../powervault-md3000_Reference%20Guide_en-us.pdf
Page 8 should explain this in detail.
Have a good rest of the day!
SysAdminTX
13 Posts
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April 22nd, 2015 07:00
It's not a matter of the chips on the disks. It's a matter of the firmware on the (PCB of the) drive. Physically the drive is identical, but Seagate developed the firmware specifically for Dell to meet Dell's requested requirements. This probably cost Dell a decent amount of money, so they flag these drives as Dell certified.
A drive that doesn't have such a firmware cannot be 'upgraded' to this firmware without very specific hardware (probably reserved to the drive manufacturer).
On the Dell PowerVault series SANs, the SAN firmware is locked down to only accept drives from a certain list (listed in the support matrix) with the Dell certified firmware.
Dell's regular (server) raid controllers for a short while during the initial release of the PERC H700/H800 also had such a firmware lock, but there were so many complaints that the next firmware release unlocked the raid controllers. Now the raid controllers just mention that the drives are unsupported (or maybe it is uncertified), but they usually work fine.
As for SANs locking drives to only specific models with specific firmwares; this is very common among SAN vendors. They do this to be able to meet the reliability standards that they want to advertise with.
On a personal note; it would be nice if SAN vendors would do a 'final' firmware release once a product is discontinued that opens up the unit to allow any drive model (that meets the hardware requirements) as the user accepts/understands that the system cannot be expected to be as reliable anymore. If this were possible, I'd pick up an MD3000i off of Ebay for use at home and load it up with some new HGST Ultrastar 2TB drives (the MD3000i never supported drives over 2TB if I remember correctly).