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I've been back and forth with Dell about their RAID cards for a PowerEdge R710 server. So far half the customer service people who I spoke too said it would work, the other half said no.

My question to them was simply this:

I have a PowerEdge R710 and looking to use 6TB SATA HD's with the 6 hotswapable slots on my R710. Would the H710 RAID card handle all 36TB of storage just fine or would it be limited to XXTB of storage instead?

And like I said above - half said yes while the other half said no - so now I'm stuck in the middle of not knowing what to do - put down the $300+ to purchase the H710 RAID card or spend that money on a newer motherboard that has at least 6 SATA III connectors on the motherboard?

Hopefully someone here has done this before or, at the very least, has better knowledge of the RAID cards from Dell then Dell themselves.

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  • I'm hard pressed to imagine 6 TB SATA hard drives as being for a professional/business deployment. <shudder>
    – HopelessN00b
    Feb 24, 2015 at 20:06
  • @HopelessN00b It's just for my personal home use.
    – StealthRT
    Feb 24, 2015 at 20:26
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    Why are you talking to their customer service reps? You should be talking to their technical support reps.
    – joeqwerty
    Feb 24, 2015 at 20:32
  • @HopelessN00b - ie. RAID6-protected budget backup solution. In my company there are two 8 * 3 TB SATA (7k2 RPM) RAID6 backup servers (Dell R520 IIRC).
    – sam_pan_mariusz
    Feb 24, 2015 at 20:37
  • @joeqwerty I have spoken to all of them - still the same half/half so I am just tired of getting different outcomes from them.
    – StealthRT
    Feb 24, 2015 at 20:45

2 Answers 2

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From the H710 Spec Sheet:

Up to 64 logical drive and 64TB LUN support

So in answer to your actual question, the card itself supports LUN sizes as high as you're wanting.

The real problem you may run into is that the H710 card is validated & tested with 12th generation server hardware it was released alongside, e.g. the R720. Your R710 only "supports" the H700 controller. I've not had any experience with trying to mix-and-match different server/card generations between 11th and 12th gen, so that would be what you should do some researching and digging on at this point.

Dell p/n NWCCG (6TB Seagate NL-SAS drive) is validated for the R720, and the H710 supports Dell-validated drives... so the controller itself most certainly can handle the drive capacity. There are no validated 6TB drives for the R710 though.

I fully expect that this setup would probably work fine if the controller will even work at all in your 11th gen server. Since you've already thrown down money on the card, and you already have the 11th gen server, I'd recommend you try buying a single 6TB drive (non-Dell should work fine for personal use - newest controller firmware won't "reject" them). Connect the drive and see whether you're able to use the full 6TB capacity before buying 5 more drives. As stated above, the max LUN size is well above what you have in mind.

You'll likely never get a 100% certain answer on this question without testing it yourself - not when you're mixing different gen hardware and trying these high-capacity drives at the same time. Good luck though!

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  • What does "LUN" stand for? Can you let me know if the H700 integrated RAID card also able to support the 36TB?
    – StealthRT
    Mar 9, 2015 at 3:32
  • It actually stands for "Logical Unit Number", essentially just a disk number for a SCSI device, but it's also commonly used to refer to a virtual disk itself too (technically incorrect, but widely used in the industry now anyway). So in this case, it refers to a single virtual disk.
    – JimNim
    Mar 9, 2015 at 3:37
  • Thanks for the answer to the LUN question. Did you also notice i asked about the H700 card? I'm unable to find a spec sheet on it and the only PDF i can find doesn't say anything about how big it can go...
    – StealthRT
    Mar 9, 2015 at 3:46
  • Ah, I didn't! I'll have to check on that tomorrow when I've got better access to documentation.
    – JimNim
    Mar 9, 2015 at 3:48
  • Awesome. I'll be looking forward to that, Jim. I have the H700 in a server i bought and was looking at the price for the 710 and its about $250 so if the H700 works then i'll just stick with that since it came with the R710 i got.
    – StealthRT
    Mar 9, 2015 at 3:59
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Is your project highly performance dependent since the very beginning? If not, you may be better going with software RAID now. If your OS of choice is GNU/Linux (no OS info in question) then supported is DDF-based mdraid. H710 specs also indicate support for DDF, so in case you need HW RAID controller in the future the migration should be piece of cake.

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