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I am trying to put in a sata drive into my dell poweredge 1950 generation 2 and my dell poweredge 2950 generation 3. The drive is a sata drive which should be supported in my module.

I was wondering what is causing it not be seen at all. The drive is a Seagate Barracuda ES. I have tested the drive in another PC and it worked fine. Is the drive not supported or is there an issue with my servers?

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  • As dyasny pointed out, these servers are really old. I second the suggestion to replace them.
    – Katherine Villyard
    Sep 29, 2015 at 20:47
  • Yeah, not going to happen my company has no money to upgrade. They work well enough and provide us with what we need. We only have 15 thousand opearations ran a day.
    – Marcello B.
    Sep 29, 2015 at 21:40
  • Alas, my condolences.
    – Katherine Villyard
    Sep 29, 2015 at 21:45
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    Nobody has "ridiculed" you, Ondeckshooting. Pointing out that your technology stack is out-of-date is just one of the many valuable services we provide.
    – womble ♦
    Sep 29, 2015 at 21:53
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    BTW, in poweredge terms, it's not "1950, generation 2", it's "1950 mark II". the x9xx series are all generation 9. Just something to keep in mind if you're trying to google specifics. Another BTW, when I worked at Dell (that was when these boxes just came out and were cool as hell frozen over) we used to be happy to take technical query calls about old, EOL models, as long as the customer didn't ask for part replacements. So you might want to call them with specific questions, chances are, the policy still exists.
    – dyasny
    Oct 1, 2015 at 3:19

2 Answers 2

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It is likely that this server has some sort of hardware RAID controller. In that case, you'll need to either go into the array management utility that is available during the boot process or install the appropriate command-line RAID controller utilities to create an array and assign your disk to that array.

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Several issues actually:

  1. This is a drive which is not supported in this machine. Never tested with it, the firmware mismatches and so on. You can ignore this, since the server is long since EOL anyhow, so who cares about warranty, support, and whatever this machine does (because who would use an EOL server for production, right?)
  2. You haven't mentioned how you are connecting the disk. If you're connecting it directly to the SATA ports on the motherboard, it is quite possible the onboard SATA controller is disabled and needs to be turned on in the BIOS.
  3. If you're trying to put the drive in a caddy and simply use it in a hotswap bay, it will not work at all. Chances are the backplane is connected to a RAID controller (SAS 6 or PERC 6 in this case IIRC) and the controller is built for SAS, not SATA. You might get it to work if you find an interposer, but that's not an easy task these days.
  4. Alternatively, the backplane might not be connected to anything, which means a missing controller and the disk just hanging there doing nothing.

[offtop]I would ditch this server completely and get a modern machine, a current enough i5 desktop can outperform it, and waste less power. The 2950 used to be a really cool device in 2007, a nice machine in 2010, and an old, useless rag in 2015. C'est la vie. [/offtop]

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