Bought a Poweredge R720XD and having trouble installing new HDD's

[Vebent]

Can't seem to find this topic anywhere. I thought I would go the easiest route and install Windows 10 since that is what I know best (that is until I ran into this problem). I have 4 NAS drives I'm taking out of my old system (my old gaming PC) and putting them into my new server. The problem is that Windows doesn't detect them in disk management at all. Has anyone ran into this problem before? Is it because I installed Windows 10 instead of Windows Server? If so, what version of Windows Server can I install? I don't mind dishing out the dough for a copy of Windows Server. I just want to make sure I get a working system.

[emosun]

is the drive controller installed

[Vebent]

Looking in device manager under storage controllers I'm seeing 2 different controllers.

 

- Microsoft storage spaces controller

- PERC H310 Mini

 

This is my first time ever messing with an actual server. So since the 2 drives that it came with booted up just fine then I would imagine it is installed.

[dbx10]

If your PERC H310 Mini is not flashed in IT passthrough mode, you need to boot into it and create a RAID array for the drives to be visible in any OS.

[Vebent]

Time to learn something new. I love this. What is a RAID array and do I boot into the PERC H310 Mini through the BIOS?

[da na]

3 minutes ago, Vebent said:

Time to learn something new. I love this. What is a RAID array and do I boot into the PERC H310 Mini through the BIOS?

Plug server into VGA

After the screen that says Dell Poweredge there will probably be a screen that says PERC Utility X.X.XXX or something along those lines, with a function key to press to enter it

Set up a RAID array - pretty simple. Select drives you want to be in the RAID array (aka duplicated) else you're basically giving the OS an empty glass and trying to convince Windows there's water in it. 

[Vebent]

2 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Plug server into VGA

After the screen that says Dell Poweredge there will probably be a screen that says PERC Utility X.X.XXX or something along those lines, with a function key to press to enter it

Set up a RAID array - pretty simple. Select drives you want to be in the RAID array (aka duplicated) else you're basically giving the OS an empty glass and trying to convince Windows there's water in it. 

Before I do this, will this format my drives? I have files on there that I don't really want to lose.

[da na]

Just now, Vebent said:

Before I do this, will this format my drives? I have files on there that I don't really want to lose.

Probably. Back them up first. 

Oh I should also ask, are your drives identical? Or at least the same capacity? 

[dbx10]

10 minutes ago, Vebent said:

Time to learn something new. I love this. What is a RAID array and do I boot into the PERC H310 Mini through the BIOS?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

In this case, the RAID card is a hardware RAID configuration and it manages groups of drives on its end and presents them as a single or multiple virtual drives to Windows depending on how many arrays are created.

I honestly wouldn't bother with it unless you wanna learn, but hardware RAID is all but dead in the server space. I'd flash the firmware on the card to IT mode, so it passes the drives through to the OS. There's plenty of guides online on how to flash IT mode on PERC cards, and there's no conceivable way to brick a raid card by trying to flash it. The card has its own write protected boot loader.

EDIT: if you already have files on the drives, don't create an array. Doing so will destroy your data. If you flash the raid card into IT mode, you will be able to access your drives as is.

[Needfuldoer]

Flash your H310 Mini to IT mode. It's very easy, and you won't ever have to deal with setting up hardware RAID. (It will also be somewhat faster, and let you use the drives properly in OSes like Proxmox and TrueNAS.) If your server is licensed for iDRAC Enterprise, you don't even have to write any bootable flash drives.

 

https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html

 

(Note: Depending on which version of BIOS and iDRAC you have installed now, DO NOT update directly to the last version! Dell messed with the onboard flash memory partitioning sometime around the release of the 13th gen Rx30 servers to get the 12th gen Rx20s in line with their successor's iDRAC 8. You have to walk it up through a couple different versions if it's too old. On the upside, once you've updated you'll be able to use Ivy Bridge Xeon V2 CPUs and an HTML5 virtual console instead of a clunky Java app.

 

 

[Vebent]

4 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Probably. Back them up first. 

Oh I should also ask, are your drives identical? Or at least the same capacity? 

It is 6 drives total, but 4 of them are NAS (what I'm trying to install).

 

Seagate 16TB Ironwolf

Seagate 8TB Ironwolf

Western Digital 14TB NAS

Western Digital 8TB NAS

[jaslion]

4 minutes ago, Vebent said:

It is 6 drives total, but 4 of them are NAS (what I'm trying to install).

 

Seagate 16TB Ironwolf

Seagate 8TB Ironwolf

Western Digital 14TB NAS

Western Digital 8TB NAS

Keep in mind putting them in any form of raid WILL WIPE THEM.

 

But these are all mismatched sizes and thats not gonna work for what it sounds like you want to do.

[Vebent]

8 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Flash your H310 Mini to IT mode. It's very easy, and you won't ever have to deal with setting up hardware RAID. (It will also be somewhat faster, and let you use the drives properly in OSes like Proxmox and TrueNAS.) If your server is licensed for iDRAC Enterprise, you don't even have to write any bootable flash drives.

 

https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html

 

(Note: Depending on which version of BIOS and iDRAC you have installed now, DO NOT update directly to the last version! Dell messed with the onboard flash memory partitioning sometime around the release of the 13th gen Rx30 servers to get the 12th gen Rx20s in line with their successor's iDRAC 8. You have to walk it up through a couple different versions if it's too old. On the upside, once you've updated you'll be able to use Ivy Bridge Xeon V2 CPUs and an HTML5 virtual console instead of a clunky Java app.

 

 

Thank you for this. This may end up being the solution to my problem. Especially since I don't want to lose any of my data and I'm adding drives as I go.

[Vebent]

4 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Keep in mind putting them in any form of raid WILL WIPE THEM.

 

But these are all mismatched sizes and thats not gonna work for what it sounds like you want to do.

I didn't know mismatched drives could be an issue. When I run out of space I just search up what's the bang for my buck. So don't do raid at all in this case? A few people here have been saying I should flash the controller into IT mode.