Dell certified drives only with PERC H700?

I hear ya. I have a PE2900 that logs warnings on the drives not being certified. In this case, though, they are not even being seen, even at boot up Ctl-R or within the boot DVD to set the server up. I proceeded to install 2008 R2 sp1, installed DSM and ran the Server Updates v6.5.0 but still no luck.

What's strange is that although the H700 apparently does not support 6Gbps SATA, the drives autonegotiate down to 3 Gbps according to Seagate.

I could care less whether they are certified since this is for lab use only. I just need to get the server to detect them. Even the drive lights dont light up.

Next steps I could try are: 1) put a different older drive in to see if it is detected, 2) downgrade the controller firmware, 3) try the drives in another T710 (I bought two).

What would be really helpful is if someone could confirm whether the H700 would normally work with a 6Gbps SATA drive that negotiates down to 3. Does anyone know that answer - at least what is supposed to happen?

So, as it turns out, the drives were fine. It was the drive trays. I compared the factory trays and the trays I bought were mislabeled - SATA and SAS screw holes were labeled backwards. Once i moved the screws to the SAS position, the drives hooked up fine. So, there was no compatibility issues with the drives at all .

Interestingly, they are negotiating 6Gbps! So - it seems as if the H700 does support 6Gbps SATA - or at least OMDA is reporting that to be the case.

These were just your own drives correct? Not Dell certified drives?

I realize you are using non-certified drives, but are you at least using "enterprise" class drives?  If you are using regular, cheap, desktop-class drives, then the project was probably doomed from the start.

Sure, I can do that once I'm finished setting it up in the next couple of days. I'll run it on a RAID 10 using 6 3TB drives.

Yes, they were my own drives - non-certified. And no, they are not enterprise class. The project may be doomed, but that sounds a bit dramatic :-). This is for a lab that is backed up twice per day with MS SCDPM. At half the price of an enterprise drive x 10 = $1800, it is an acceptable risk, and makes the project testing feasible and affordable. If this were running Exchange in production - different story.

These drives are 750,000 MTBF with a 3 year warranty. It's a 6 month project at best, and running RAID 10 with frequent backups, I'll take the risk. My last lab server (PE2900) is running years+ (repurposed for other things) without a single failure or predicted failure on desktop drives. Maybe another 6 months to a year? In any case, it's a value judgement and depends upon what they're being used for. Unfortunately, Dell doesn't sell any less expensive certified drives for lab use.

It is a bit exciting to me to hear that non-certified SATA drives work and that they negotiate at 6Gb. You should run an ATTO benchmark for us and see what kind of speeds you get.

My advice ... don't buy drives from Dell.  Buy Dell drives from alternative suppliers.  Get the part numbers from Dell then save up to 50% by buying them elsewhere.

Okay, here is the first pass at running ATTO Benchmark (as requested).

Specs:

T710 with H700 + 1GB NVRAM

6 Seagate desktop drives - SATA/7200/64mb - 3TB each

RAID 10 configuration using all 6 drives

For the last line (8192KB transfer size):

Write: 3,197,246 MB/s

Read: 2,953,446 MB/s

On another T710 with same specs but only 4 drives in a RAID 5, I got this:

Write: 2,470,674 MB/s

Read: 2,247,981 MB/s

3 million Megabytes per second would at best be to cache and a 7200rpm drive maxes out at maybe 149MByte/s sustained throughput. A 6-disk raid 10 means you're writing to 3 drives for each stripe, so you could expect at most up to 3 times a single drive's speed.

Yeah, no argument there. I was just posting the direct results from ATTO - someone asked what the numbers would look like in ATTO. As a side note, I get the same results with the direct I/O and force write options enabled.

It sounds fast and I'm just glad this worked out ok.

I have a refurb R410 coming next week and I'm going to be installing some 3TB drives in there. It only has a PERC6/i in there....but if that doesn't play well with 3TB drives....here comes an H700!

You may as well order that H700 now as it got a firmware update that added support for drives larger than 2TB, but the PERC6i never did get such a firmware upgrade.

Nw you can imagine my anger, specifically asking the Salesperson if I can use my own SAS drives on a MD3200, having this confirmed. Purchaseing  all the Mounting brackets and four SAS controlers and now finding out I cant use my drives.. The Salesperson also refsuing to take my calls (from Tarsus South Africa) Sneaky very sneaky Dell...Not funny Great product but really not amused to have a gun cocked and loaded and pointing at my head.

Tyranny is holding a gun while you take my money. Freedom is giving me a choice.  You want to use your drives,?  "You are on your own"  This is I have always understood and accepted . Not Amused

Quite correct took delivery last week  :emotion-2: