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PERC H710 not detecting 4TB SAS Drives
I am trying to upgrade a T320 from 2TB SATA drives in a RAID10 array to 4TB SAS drives (still in a RAID10 array) one at a time. The server has a PERC H710 in it and I figured it should be as simple as finding the drives Dell says to put in it "DELL KCVF5 4TB 7200RPM NEAR LINE SAS-12GBPS 512N 3.5INCH", and swapping them out. Ran into one snag and that is the server had an SFF-8087 to 4x SATA cable. Ordered an SFF-80878 to SFF-8482 cable and put it in place. All drives detected, so I figure I'm good to swap out one of the drives for the new 4TB SAS drives. Not detected, try another drive, not detected. Update the PERC FW, not detected, update the BIOS, not detected, update the iDRAC FW, not detected, try UEFI mode, not detected. Does anyone have any idea why the drives Dell said were compatible with the system are not compatible?
If I need to clear the config and replace all the drives at once I can do that, but I would prefer not to as it hosts a bunch of our test VMs and I do not want to export them then import them back in.
Dell-DylanJ
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Posted May 2nd, 2019 08:00
The drives should show up in a 'Ready' state. Even if you can't add them to the current array, the PERC should offer you the ability to create a separate virtual disk.
The problem may very likely be that they're cabled and you'd have 2 SAS and SATA trying to communicate across the same wire. What you might try in order to rule that out would be to gracefully shutdown the system, remove the SATA drives, install the SAS drives, power up, then boot to the PERC utility to see if the drives are picked up then.
The issue was the fact that the SFF-80878 to SFF-8482 breakout cable had the 3.3v connector connected and it was causing the drives to shut down. They are working after I removed the 3.3v wire between the drive connector & the SATA power connector on the cable. Not the most elegant solution, but it works now.
Dell-DylanJ
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Posted April 30th, 2019 09:00
The page for that drive is showing the drive as compatible with the T320. Does the drive have any LED activity at all when plugged in? I see that you tested multiple drives, so the slot may be part of the issue, but the drives should be getting power at the least.
SAS drives cannot be put into a SATA array, though. Moving to SAS from SATA will require a new virtual disk and data migration.