Friday, October 6, 2017

SATA Drive Replacement on Dell PowerEdge R410



I just talked to our Dell rep about purchasing some PowerEdge R410s and R510s and he made a comment that the SATA drives are 'special' and can't be replaced by aftermarket drives because of some special connector/board on the drives.



I found some references to an 'interposer board' that is attached to the back of the drives/trays in some PE systems. Is this what he's talking about?




My plan is to buy the cheapest SATA drives from Dell (160GB) so I can get the hotplug trays and replace the drives with 1TB drives. I figured I'd just pull the Dell HDs out and replace them with aftermarket drives.



My question is: Is this as simple as it sounds or am I missing something? (basic PERC6/RAID config aside)


Answer



Yes, the Dell drives are special -- they cost a pile more, have a Dell warranty, and your rep probably gets a commission out of selling them, all of which you don't get if you don't buy Dell hard drives. (Whether those are benefits or drawbacks I leave to your own best judgment). For the record, we run aftermarket drives in our R410s (mostly SAS, I think) without a problem, using the same trick (buy cheapo drives, remove the caddies, use drives for target practice on the clay pigeon range).


No comments:

Post a Comment

linux - How to SSH to ec2 instance in VPC private subnet via NAT server

I have created a VPC in aws with a public subnet and a private subnet. The private subnet does not have direct access to external network. S...