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I am interested in breathing new life in my old Poweredge 1950/1950 III servers and was wondering if the PERC H700 controllers are compatible.

Has anyone attempted such an upgrade and has it been successful?

Cheers, Michael.

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Yes, this works...

No, it's not a good idea.

You're talking about a server generation that was mainly relevant from 2006-2008. As such, the drive technologies have changed, backplane speeds have increased and practical considerations like power utilization, (low) memory capacity and CPU performance make it a bad platform for investing any resources.

To use a newer RAID controller in this server, you'll need:

  • The new controller.
  • Firmware updates.
  • SAS adapter cables to go from older SAS SFF-8484 connectors to SAS SFF-8087.
  • Understand that SATA drives will probably link at 1.5Gbps, not 3.0Gbps or 6.0Gbps.
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  • Thanks for the link, seen it before, but most people were talking about PE2950 with SATA drives. My PE1950 use 4x2.5 146gb SAS drives. And the most important question that was not answered in that article, is whether the backplane will run at 6G or not?
    – Michael Mussulis
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:46
  • Thanks for the comprehensive answer. If it's not a good idea, what can go wrong? I obviously intend in upgrading the drives to 6G drives, and I use only SAS drives not SATA. When you say firmware updates, for what precisely? I've already updated the bios, and drac, and whatever I could.
    – Michael Mussulis
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:49
  • The H700 controller firmware and the disks are worth updating, depending on where you source them from... I'd expect things to link at 3.0Gbps with real SAS disks. You ask "what can go wrong?" - Well, it could just not work, the resulting system could be unstable, performance may be subpar... I don't think it's worth the risk, since better and more efficient gear is available on the used market now.
    – ewwhite
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:54
  • Mmmm... sounds like a waste of a perfectly good server to give up on it. I hear ya about other newer 2nd hand, but generally speaking you're talking about over 300 euros for a newer generation server. I know I may sound thick headed, but is there absolutely no way forward to upgrade? And why do you expect linkups at 3Gbps and not 6G if both the controller and drives are upgraded correspondingly?
    – Michael Mussulis
    Mar 6, 2015 at 7:06
  • Because backplanes can do weird things. You're talking about connecting disks to a backplane that predates them... Odd things can happen. That's why hardware has a specific usable lifetime. Think of it like this: the servers in question have been replaced by FOUR different product versions since 2008.
    – ewwhite
    Mar 6, 2015 at 7:33

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