Dell PowerEdge T20 Owner's Manual

Your system supports four 3.5-inch entry-level hard drives and enterprise class hard drives. Entry-level hard drives are designed for 8x5 operating environment and enterprise class hard drives are designed for 24x7 operating environment. Two hard drives are located in the removable hard drive cage and two hard drives are located in the fixed hard drive bay.

Choosing the right hard drive type depends on the usage pattern. Improper use of entry-level hard drives (including workloads exceeding 550 TB/year) leads to significant risk and increases the failure rate of the drives. Due to industry advances, in some cases, the larger capacity drives have been changed to a larger sector size. The larger sector size can have impacts on operating systems and applications. For more information about these hard drives, see the 512e and 4Kn Disk Formats white paper and 4K Sector HDD FAQ document at Dell.com/poweredgemanuals.

All hard drives are connected to the system board through the hard drive backplane. Hard drives are supplied in hot-swappable hard drive carriers that fit in the hard drive slots.

When you format a hard drive, allow enough time for the formatting to be complete. Be aware that high-capacity hard drives can take a long time to format.