Dell certified drives only with PERC H700?

How enlightening can this really be, when all truly informative communications about the H700 situation are deleted by the Dell moderator?

This is a very enlightening thread. 

I have similar concerns about  the PERC 6/i card for a server I am about to purchase.  I'd like to invite you to see the new thread, "Certified drives only on Perc6/i?". 

Any help navigating through technical and bureacratic imbroglio of Dell would be helpful.  I have been building servers for 25 years, but this is my first Dell. 

PERC 6i does not seem to have those limitations. Added drives to my own personal server and they are fine.

 Just adding my two cents. I was one of the unfortunate people the ordered a T610 with a H700 RAID thinking I could add my own SAS Drives. The kicker is that I ordered Seagate drives and they are the same model Seagate drives that dell sells. The only difference is the "Dell Certified" firmware in the Dell drives. I fail to see that one drive is better that the other just because of the firmware. If this was the case I would think that Seagate would code their firmware to make them that much better against their retail competitors such as WD and Fujitsu.

 On another note I also received confirmation the Dell is supposed to be modifying/updating the H700 Firmware to allow non-Dell drives. This was via email from Dell technical support. I received the confirmation on 5/6/2010, but as of 7 weeks later there still isn't an update. Hope to see one soon I have 4 300GB SAS drives just sitting on a shelf.

Dave

The firmware on one is not "better" than the firmware of the other ... Dell drives have Dell-specific firmware loaded on them to allow them to work seamlessly with, and respond efficiently to commands sent from the PERC controllers.  The only way for Dell to be able to guarantee the reliability of their high-performance hardware is to make sure all the hardware is optimized to work together.  It would be nice if everything were universal, but Dell is not alone in optimizing their hardware for performance and reliability.  I can completely understand the need to do this, but absolutely disagree with is charging the prices they do for their drives.  The actual manufacturers are not (and have never) charged that kind of premium for OEM optimization to justify the prices Dell is asking.

Do you really believe what you are saying?  LOL!  An if it were indeed truly the case then Dell would not need to BLOCK other drives.  They would simply market their product against the competition citing their performance gains and would justify their higher prices by these gains as well.  Of course, how could you trust that a company would not dumb down a controller's performance by cutomizing the firmware to response differently to different "brands" of disks.  The whole thing is very very questionable in my mind and once a manufacturer starts messing with these factors one has to start to wonder if they can be trusted.

Its not a matter of performance and competition, it is a matter of reliability.  If you had a critical server crashing randomly, losing RAID configs, corrupting data, wouldn't you want to know what was causing it?  And assuming it was hardware-related and not your own fault, wouldn't you hold Dell somewhat accountable to find and fix the problem with their hardware?  Dell has optimized firmware on both devices to do just that, and when you are working with non-certified drives and the controller log is full of drive responses equivalent to "I don't know what you mean." and "I don't understand." - or the log lacking anything meaningful because the drives don't know how to tell you what happened - it makes it impossible to know exactly what is going on.  Having non-certified drives means that Dell cannot help you figure these things out - Dell cannot guarantee the reliability of your server - you'll be on your own to figure it out and fix it (by probably getting new certified drives :emotion-3:).

What is funny is that it sounds like you want them to dumb down their hardware.  Why don't you just run your business using workstations?

Knowing a little something about RAID and computer hardware, I am comfortable with the fact that it is necessary that they will have a special firmware, and I would gladly pay a bit more knowing that they will guarantee my machine should be working as I expect it to.  The thing I don't like is that it is not a "bit more" they charge but in many cases 2-4 times what you can buy the exact same Dell drive for elsewhere.

Look around ... go ask HP, IBM, or other server RAID gurus, and you'll find that this practice is not a Dell invention, but fairly standard practice.  What I don't understand is why you do business with someone you don't trust.  Just buy from somewhere else.

Anyway ... good luck to all.

Yesterday, Dell released the A02 Firmware for the H700. I briefly tested it, as it says nothing in the release notes about this issue.

At first sight, it DOES NO LONGER BLOCK any non-Dell drives.

I placed some Seagate Cheetah 15k and some Seagate Barracuda 7.2k drives in the system, and I could create virtual volumes on all of them.

I'm trying to install an OS on them at the moment and all seems to be going fine.

Can you please provide a link to the H700 A02 firmware you described above?  I went to the support.dell.com site and specified a T610 server and then a RAID SAS controller and then the H700 and the only firmware listed was the 4.23.0.64, A01.  Although this has a date of yesterday, it is not A02 and there is no mention in the description of the BLOCK removal.

My Bad!!!  I was looking at the latest DRIVER rather than the firmware.  Sorry.  It is 12.3.0-0032, A02 for the H700.

Maybe they updated the releasenotes

Here they are

Looks like Dell have turned around on this policy.

Fixes
=========

1. Improved disk medium error correction for cases where large numbers of
errors are found.


Enhancements/Tasks
======================

1. Increased performance of random workloads on solid-state drives.

2. Increased performance of small sequential workloads.

3. Unconfigured and hot spare disks can be spun down to conserve power.

4. A virtual disk's capacity can be expanded if there is free space
available on its physical disks.

5. The controller can be configured to use existing system backplane or storage
enclosure disk slots that have hot spares configured as persistent hot spare
slots. A hot spare disk can then be removed and replaced with replacement
disks without having to configure the new disk as a hot spare. Any disk
inserted on that hot slot will be overwritten and become a hot spare.

6. Enhanced controller error recovery.

7. Non-Dell certified hard drives will no longer be blocked

that bullet point #7 you've highlighted does not exist (anymore?):

That text file may not list it, but it's still in the "Fixes and enhancements" section in the download page <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>.

Sorry for reviving an old thread, but I have a follow-up question that I can't seem to find the answer to. When you add a 3rd party drive to an r510, which tray do you use and does the drive require an interposer? I have been unable to find the answer online and calling Dell directly hasn't been fruitful. The drives that shipped with the server are 341-8727's and the server has a 12 drive chasis. Thank you in advance!

Part # X968D will work for you. That is the part number for the carriers that came with the original (341-8727) drives.

Daniel