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October 22nd, 2022 07:00
Using individual disks in non-RAID mode on a H750 controller
I have bought four new R540 servers each fitted with the H750 RAID controller with the intention of adding five 4 TB SAS disks to each and using these as independent drives rather than as a RAID array. If I create five RAID 0 arrays each with one disk in it, will this work? This certainly works with the older PERC 5 and PERC 6 controllers.
Andy
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andyt22imp
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November 20th, 2022 01:00
In the end I bought some Seagate Exos 7E8 4TB SAS disks which were immediately recognised by the H750 controller as non-RAID disks and they work fine in the R540 I installed them into although the controller utility doesn't display the SMART info for these (which isn't mission-critical). So problem solved - I'm ordering another twenty of these.
I've no idea why the WD disks caused so much grief although they do seem to work fine in other Dell systems that use different RAID/HBA controllers so the expenditure hasn't been wasted. I chose these Western Digital disks because they are actually HGST disks, WD having bought up HGST (formerly Hitachi, formerly IBM Storage) since I've found HGST disks to be very reliable over the past decade.
Origin3k
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October 22nd, 2022 11:00
Yes you can create 5x RAID0.
Since H730p the PERC supports a second mode... you can chosse between RAID or Passtrough. The later one presents the existing drives as single Disks to the OS.
Check the H750 manual if there is support for,
Regards,
Joerg
andyt22imp
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October 26th, 2022 10:00
The problem I am having is the Dell SATA SSD that the server was shipped with is recognized OK by the controller but of the 5 x 4TB additional disks I have since added, some are detected by the H11 configuration utility but others are rejected as being 'unsupported' - the Physical DIsk management screen on the H11 utility sometimes reports all 5 additional disks like this:
Physical Disk 01:01: HDD, SAS, 0KB, Unconfigured Bad (Unsupported), (512B)
With the R540 BIOS set to boot in UEFI mode, sometimes all 5 disks are reported as bad/unsupported but if I switch the BIOS to legacy mode, then some of disks are detected, others aren't.
Even with the disks that are detected, information from SMART such as disk model no, serial, no, etc is missing, the disk controller is reported as 'needs attention' in both the H11 utility and via iDRAC 9 with no indication of what the problem is and the R540''s status LED blinks amber all the time.
The disks are all brand new Western Digital DC HC310, 12Gb/s SAS disks with 4K physical sectors from a batch of 20 I purchased and they all work fine in other Dell servers with different SAS controllers. Also, other disks such as older Dell 600GB 6 Gb/s SAS disks are fully are fully recognised in the R540 complete with SMART info and will work with this controller.
I'm getting the feeling the WD DC310 disks are incompatible with the H750 controller and I should be looking at another brand of disk such as Seagate - has anyone else had this problem?