Dell PowerEdge r720 doesn't detect my SSDs

[joelleung]

So I have a Dell PowerEdge R720 server (I'm guessing from 2011-2012) which hasn't been used in years, and recently I decided to repurpose it. A quick background on the server: It's second hand, used to run linux before I installed windows 10 on it (which worked fine for a day and then stopped working the next morning) and a few months later (now), I looked deeper into the issue and found some error related to something in the neighbourhood of RAID and my SSDs that are installed in it.

 

Here's a quick rundown of whats wrong with the server:
1) during boot up when it reaches the RAID part and prompts me to press control R if I want to enter the configuration utility, it won't respond, and after a period of time it will show "adapter at baseport not responding" followed by "no adapter" (refer to pics).

2) after the adapter not responding stuff, when it tries to boot, it says that there are no boot media available

 

I have tried taking out the raid controller and putting it back in, I've also tried booting with raid disabled, switched the drives from AHCI to RAID and back to no avail, ran hardware diagnostics in the lifecycle controller which threw up an error code 2000-0141 (refer to pic) and I have no idea what it means, and finally I've also tried to boot from a bootable drive using windows 10 and windows server 2012 R2 (both of which did not detect any hard disks at all when it asked me where I'd like to install).

Relatively useful specs/info:
4 250GB Samsung 750 evo's

Dell PERC S110 raid controller (integrated raid controller)
48GB of ram in total (quite useless to know)

Intel xeon something (also useless to know)

 

I also have no knowledge about servers at all, so I might not know what I've been doing this whole time, and more importantly why the server won't recognize the 4 SSDs in it. Also something to note, there are no blinking lights or any lights at all on each of the SSD enclosures when the server is on.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id replace that raid card. THe s110 really isn't great. Get a h200/h310 if you want a jbod card, and get a h710 if you want raid.

[Salv8 (sam)]

either one of your ssd's may have died and your card doesn't want to do anything (highly unlikely as the card would tell you one of the drives has failed and wouldn't be acting this way) or the card is having issues and is deciding not to cooperate with you (more likely)

your best bet is to try the ssd's by themselves in another system and see if they get seen, if so then if possible try another RAID card and see if it can see all of the drives

if one or more of your ssd's aren't seen, then thats most likely the problem, if all of them are seen by themselves and the other RAID card can also see all of them, then your current RAID card probably is the problem, and you should replace it with something better as @Electronics Wizardy said

[joelleung]

12 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id replace that raid card. THe s110 really isn't great. Get a h200/h310 if you want a jbod card, and get a h710 if you want raid.

Thanks! How would I be sure about compatibility issues though?

[joelleung]

3 hours ago, Salv8 (sam) said:

either one of your ssd's may have died and your card doesn't want to do anything (highly unlikely as the card would tell you one of the drives has failed and wouldn't be acting this way) or the card is having issues and is deciding not to cooperate with you (more likely)

your best bet is to try the ssd's by themselves in another system and see if they get seen, if so then if possible try another RAID card and see if it can see all of the drives

if one or more of your ssd's aren't seen, then thats most likely the problem, if all of them are seen by themselves and the other RAID card can also see all of them, then your current RAID card probably is the problem, and you should replace it with something better as @Electronics Wizardy said

Yea, I was thinking of trying that too, thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a shot tonight and update you guys if the SSDs work

[joelleung]

12 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id replace that raid card. THe s110 really isn't great. Get a h200/h310 if you want a jbod card, and get a h710 if you want raid.

Oh yea, which one is considerably better? should I use raid or jbod as you mentioned?

[Electronics Wizardy]

10 minutes ago, joelleung said:

Oh yea, which one is considerably better? should I use raid or jbod as you mentioned?

what os and what do you want to do with your storage? There better at different things.

[joelleung]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what os and what do you want to do with your storage? There better at different things.

I'm planning to run windows server and just use the storage as... well, storage

what perks do each one bring to the table?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, joelleung said:

I'm planning to run windows server and just use the storage as... well, storage

what perks do each one bring to the table?

So what is your boot drive? Do you want to boot from a raid array? 

 

Do you want to use storage spaces?

[joelleung]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

So what is your boot drive? Do you want to boot from a raid array? 

 

Do you want to use storage spaces?

what does a raid array mean? and whats storage spaces? sorry I'm not too knowledgeable with tech terms 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, joelleung said:

what does a raid array mean? and whats storage spaces? sorry I'm not too knowledgeable with tech terms 

You probably want to do some learning before using this system.

 

Id go h710 here then.

[joelleung]

ahhh okay... thanks for your help

[NelizMastr]

I'd also just pick up some SATA harddrives for good measure. For just plain storage, using consumer SSDs is a bit of a waste. The performance is limited by the network interface (1 gigabit, so effectively ~110MB/s transfers where the SSD's can do 500+ and even more in RAID) in the end. As a boot drive or multi-tier storage solution, sure, but just SSDs? Nah.

[joelleung]

1 hour ago, NelizMastr said:

I'd also just pick up some SATA harddrives for good measure. For just plain storage, using consumer SSDs is a bit of a waste. The performance is limited by the network interface (1 gigabit, so effectively ~110MB/s transfers where the SSD's can do 500+ and even more in RAID) in the end. As a boot drive or multi-tier storage solution, sure, but just SSDs? Nah.

I think the 4 Samsung 750 Evos currently in the server already is sata (whatever that means), but the problem now is that it won't even detect the drives

[NelizMastr]

36 minutes ago, joelleung said:

I think the 4 Samsung 750 Evos currently in the server already is sata (whatever that means), but the problem now is that it won't even detect the drives

I meant hard drives, sorry for the confusion. And yes, I know it's not seeing the drives. Like people have mentioned you should get a different harddisk controller. To me, it just seems like that onboard controller is either flaky or downright defective.

[joelleung]

2 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

I meant hard drives, sorry for the confusion. And yes, I know it's not seeing the drives. Like people have mentioned you should get a different harddisk controller. To me, it just seems like that onboard controller is either flaky or downright defective.

Ahhh okay, what good will hard drives do in comparison to SSDs?

[NelizMastr]

8 minutes ago, joelleung said:

Ahhh okay, what good will hard drives do in comparison to SSDs?

Provide more storage per dollar, and performance simply isn't relevant when the network link is just 1Gbps. 

[joelleung]

40 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

Provide more storage per dollar, and performance simply isn't relevant when the network link is just 1Gbps. 

Whats the component is controlling or throttling the network link to 1gbps? and isn't hard disks more prone to wear and tear?

[NelizMastr]

13 minutes ago, joelleung said:

Whats the component is controlling or throttling the network link to 1gbps? and isn't hard disks more prone to wear and tear?

The NIC (network interface card) controls the speed of the network. All servers since roughly 2003 come with gigabit ports as standard, and in recent years, 10Gbps cards have become more or less affordable as an upgrade.

 

Wear and tear depends on the workload. A harddisk doesn't have a fixed limit where it will kick the bucket because it's not limited to a number of write cycles like an SSD. So there are pros and cons to each.

[joelleung]

2 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

The NIC (network interface card) controls the speed of the network. All servers since roughly 2003 come with gigabit ports as standard, and in recent years, 10Gbps cards have become more or less affordable as an upgrade.

 

Wear and tear depends on the workload. A harddisk doesn't have a fixed limit where it will kick the bucket because it's not limited to a number of write cycles like an SSD. So there are pros and cons to each.

I see... well I'm in no financial position to get new hard disks to plop into my server, so I have to make do with the 4 ssds that were already installed, it should still work right? although you mentioned the speeds will be capped or something

[joelleung]

Oh yea, is it possible to bypass the raid controller all in all? I just want to boot up into something, not stare at a boot failed screen, even if I just run on 1 disk (which I somehow can't because it would say drive __ in bay __ has been removed)

[NelizMastr]

1 hour ago, joelleung said:

Oh yea, is it possible to bypass the raid controller all in all? I just want to boot up into something, not stare at a boot failed screen, even if I just run on 1 disk (which I somehow can't because it would say drive __ in bay __ has been removed)

Nope. The bays on the server are connected to a backplane, which is connected to the RAID controller. Sometimes the server has an internal SATA port, but that's often used by the optical drive, and there's no other means to power it if you were to put the SSD on the inside somewhere. You'll need to replace the RAID controller, reconnect the backplane to it and it should be fine.

[joelleung]

1 hour ago, NelizMastr said:

Nope. The bays on the server are connected to a backplane, which is connected to the RAID controller. Sometimes the server has an internal SATA port, but that's often used by the optical drive, and there's no other means to power it if you were to put the SSD on the inside somewhere. You'll need to replace the RAID controller, reconnect the backplane to it and it should be fine.

Ah shit... thats expensive though... 

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, joelleung said:

Oh yea, is it possible to bypass the raid controller all in all? I just want to boot up into something, not stare at a boot failed screen, even if I just run on 1 disk (which I somehow can't because it would say drive __ in bay __ has been removed)

You can boot from usb or network if you want. But if you want to use those front bays you need to use the raid card.

[joelleung]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can boot from usb or network if you want. But if you want to use those front bays you need to use the raid card.

Boot from USB or network? how would I do that? It sounds like the most promising option now since I can't afford a new raid controller