The MD3000i will not allow you to use uncertified drives,. The SSD drives may be recognized but the will be marked a uncertifed and you will be unable to use them. The MD3000i will only work with the drives listed on the MD3000i support matrix.

-cjtompsett

I haven't tried using SSDs in the MDs personally. However... the out-of-box thinking got me thinking...about possible problems

 If you do manage to find Dell SSDs, they are probably going to be 2.5" and so you will have to figure out how to plug them into a 3.5"enclosure

There is no spinup on SSDs... so the controller might get confused if the disk just shows up ready to roll... though probably not

I'm not sure how SSDs report themselves to the controllers as. If they have unique report mechanisms, they may not work correctly...

Just some thoughts on possible failures....

-Mohan

Summarized from what cjtompsett said; this system doesn't accept anything but certified drives, and Dell never certified any SSDs for the MD3000-series, so you won't be able to get any SSDs (even those that are Dell certified for PowerEdge servers, Dell Equallogic systems and/or Dell|EMC systems) to work in an MD3000/MD3000i.

I should say with SAS drives the controllers saturate before the drives in our testing on it.  Not really true with SATA drives,  the controllers are always waiting on the drives it seems no matter how many are in the group.

It would not really buy you much if anything anyways.

The controllers on the MD3000i saturate before the drives with any sort of spindle count on the disk group in my experiences with them.