0

I recently purchased a Dell Poweredge 2950 at an auction for a very low price, couldn't pass it up. It didn't come with any hard drives so I ordered 5 SATA caddy trays and I am curious what the maximum size the hard disks could be. I plan on doing RAID 6 so I have plenty of redundancy and I would like to have at least 1TB drives installed. Will the 2950 support 5-6 1TB drives or maybe even 2TB drives? I'm not concerned whether or not dell "supports it". I have already tested a WD Green 500GB SATA drive I had lying around and it worked fine in the SAS bay. Also, will the caddys I ordered still have lights that tell me whether or not a drive is dead or is that just an SAS thing?

1 Answer 1

3

2TB drives (2.5" and 3.5") will work on the PERC 5, 6, and H700.
3TB drives are only supported on the PERC H700; support was added via firmware update, so if you buy one, make sure to update the controller firmware for 3TB support. 3TB support is controller-specific, not system specific, so an H700 in a 2950 would take 3TB drives and a PERC 6 in an R710 would not.

In order for Windows OS's to use a >2TB, the "disk" must be converted to GPT. Windows OS's CAN boot to GPT IF using 64-bit Vista/2008 (or later) installed on a UEFI-enabled system (which the R710 is but the 2950 is not).

As far as the lights, I believe the lights on the caddy should work as you would expect, but it's been a while since I had one to play with.

Support Documentation: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19309039.aspx

1
  • According to DELL after inputting my service tag mine has a "Dell PowerEdge PERC 6/i SAS RAID Controller Card PCI-E H726F" It looks like I will be using 2TB then?
    – Steve
    Jan 23, 2015 at 18:08

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .