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I've been tasked to price up and order a new server. My plans are for a Dell Poweredge R510 with the 8 HDD option, an LSI 9265-8i RAID card, two Dell 600GB 15k 3.5" SAS drives in RAID 1, and six Intel 520 120GB 2.5" SATA III SSDs in three RAID 1 volumes.

I've searched and searched and can't find any useful into on the Dell 8 HDD backplane. What I need to know is, is the backplane wired up to the Dell system board? If it is, can I rewire it to the LSI RAID card? If it isn't, can I insert the above drives and connect them to the LSI card without issue?

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  • Have you tried contacting Dell support ?
    – Lucas Kauffman
    Feb 13, 2012 at 12:46
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    What sense is there in buying a server from a company you refuse to talk to in order to get additional informations about their system? If you consider their pre-sales support that bad, what about post-sale support?
    – Sven
    Feb 13, 2012 at 13:00
  • "There's not a lot of choice in the server market so Dell it is" - Right, except Dell is the #2 manufacturer... meaning there must be some other company that's #1. Have you tried picking up the phone and calling either? Or finding a reseller, possibly a local company, who is likely to be extremely responsive? FWIW HP's backplanes are connected via standard cables to the MB and can easily be rerouted to add-in cards; I'd have an extremely hard time believe Dell does anything different (especially since both Perc and SA cards are based partially on LSI's chips).
    – Chris S
    Feb 16, 2012 at 18:56
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    There is a LOT of chjhoice and yyour selection is not optimal. Check the stuff SuperMicro has - you will be surprsised. I use a SuperMicro with 24 discs in 1 rack units and thinkg of getting a4 racu unit with 72 disc slots. All standard SAS.
    – TomTom
    Feb 16, 2012 at 19:37

3 Answers 3

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The back plane will have two cables coming off of it that would run to what ever PERC or SAS card you had to run the drives. If you go with the mega-raid option from Dell, the backplane will already be hooked up to the controller. If you get the mega-raid from a 3rd party vendor then you will have to disconnect the cables from the controller, remove the controller, install the mega-raid card and hook the cables that you unplugged from the original controller into the mega-raid card.

Hope that helps.

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  • Thank you. I've got an account manager now and they confirmed pretty much the same (albeit reluctantly as obviously they prefer to sell their own cards). I think in retrospect should have ordered the Perc H700 or H800 but didn't know at the time (and still don't) which card is equivalent to the 9265. I gather the H700 would suffice. Live and learn!
    – Stephen Kennedy
    Feb 20, 2012 at 15:12
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for your information, the PERC H700 1gb could be pretty much the equivalent of the 9265, Dell H700 has the LSI2108 and the 9265 card has the LSI2208, I don't know exactly the difference but the technical specification of boths cards seems very similar.

The H800 card is the same as H700 but with external connectors instead of internals, if you are going to use an external array, you'll need the H800 option

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  • Thanks. I have the server and RAID card now so kinda academic. Looks like will all fit. I gather the H700 is single core? The H800 is, from what I can tell by Googling, the same as the LSI 9265-8i but doesn't support SATA. The server we bought has an H200 fitted with the same cables as the 9265 so I'll either remove that and replace with the LSI or just unplug it and use the cables. Will post an answer when I know for sure how/if it all fits together.
    – Stephen Kennedy
    Feb 25, 2012 at 19:34
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I did end up dealing with Dell support in the end, and it was a lot less painful than I expected.

I'm posting my findings here in case it helps someone else. Yes, what I asked is possible but with some caveats.

The empty drive bays do not contain caddies. They can be sourced fairly easily on the internet. The part code for the R510 caddy is F238F and 2.5" drives also require a 2.5" adapter, P/N 9W8C4.

The 8265 doesn't fit in the internal RAID slot but a slightly less wide card would. I had to fit into one of the regular PCI-E slots.

The cables from the backplane do not reach to the PCI-E slots and I had to source replacements.

I had to remove H200 for the LSI card to work.

The system is fully functional but I probably wouldn't bother unless upgrading an old out of warranty machine.

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