P630f: 15k drives?

What is the 630 attaching to? PV650F? FC4500? FC5600? FC4700?

Which flare revision is running on your array?

Older flares may not recognize the newer drive forcing you to get a flare upgrade before the array will recognize the drive. Obviously the drive would need to be at a certified firmware level and would have to be 520 byte formatted.

The chassis shouldn't have a problem with the drive. Not sure about the bracket as drives tend to ship from Dell with the bracket already attached, so not sure if they use different parts for different drives (never really bothered to check that).

If you already have a couple of the drives you can install them and monitor them with a S.M.A.R.T utility, here is a link to most of the major HDD vendors tools: http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/be_hdd2.html

If the vibration is too much for the enclosure you will start to see seek errors outside of the norm.


So a question regarding your setup, do you already have the 630F working as a JBOD? Did you have to do anything special as far as configuration? I have a 630F that I just got and I'm having trouble getting win2k to see the seagate cheetah disk that I have installed. The 630F is directly connected to a qlogic 2200 using the EMC approved driver from dell's website. The disk shows up under device manager but not disk administrator where you would normally format it. I am starting to wonder if this is a bad disk. I've tried to low-level format it to make sure it is 512 byte but I get an error whenever I try this. Just curious what you've had to do to get a 630F to work as a lone JBOD.