Dell PowerEdge R710 Storage Upgrade Questions

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Hello,

I am quite new to the whole home server hobby. I have recently acquired a Dell PowerEdge R710. After opening it up it seems like the raid card it came with was the: PERC 6i pci-e sas raid controller. it also came with 4 300 gb SAS drives. I am looking to upgrade the storage capacity of the r710 and possibly fill all 8 drive bays. My question would be: Would Seagate BarraCuda 2.5 inch sata drives work in this server? Or would it require me to get a new raid controller?

Thanks for your time!

[tJuggernaut29]

SATA drives can go into a SAS backplane, but SAS drives cant go into a SATA backplane.

 

You should be good to go

 

Also, to get to the raid card to set up your raid arrays/ storage pools, you do that through the BIOS. Look for which F key to hit.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Sata drives will work in that system up to 2TB, but Id probably avoid those barracuda drives(and all other current 2.5in laptop drives). Those drives are likely SMR, so they will have awful performance in some workloads, like in a raid config. 

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15 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Sata drives will work in that system up to 2TB, but Id probably avoid those barracuda drives(and all other current 2.5in laptop drives). Those drives are likely SMR, so they will have awful performance in some workloads, like in a raid config. 

What type of drives would you recommend?

[Electronics Wizardy]

35 minutes ago, S1LENT said:

What type of drives would you recommend?

SSDs would be the go to if you can afford the extra.

 

If you want cheap mass storage Id go with external 3.5 in hdds. Much better than a 2.5in based solution.

 

You can find some decent deals of groups of 2.5in sas hdds, but those are going to likey be used.

[Needfuldoer]

3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can find some decent deals of groups of 2.5in sas hdds, but those are going to likey be used.

If you're just playing around with server stuff, I recommend going this route. You can get 1.2 TB 10k SAS HDDs for around $30 in the US, including Dell caddies for the 11th/12th/13th gen PowerEdge servers. (If you upgrade to an Rx20 or Rx30 later on, the drives should just pop right in.) 600 GB SAS drives can be had for around $10 apiece.

 

They'll be used, and they won't have the IOPS of an SSD, but that won't really matter if you're just accessing it over the network anyway.

 

One thing to watch out for: if you get used drives that came out of a NetApp or other big storage array, they might be formatted with 520 byte sectors. If so, you'll have to low level format them as 512 byte sector drives before you can use them with a regular server OS. It's not that difficult, the hardest part is waiting.

 

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to-reformat-520-byte-drives-to-512-bytes-usually/133021

 

If you want the drives passed through to the OS, instead of getting handled in virtual RAID volumes, you might need a different SAS controller that supports IT mode. The Dell H310 can be had for around $25, and it's easy to flash to IT mode firmware. (You can also get a pre-flashed card for a higher price.)

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19 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

SSDs would be the go to if you can afford the extra.

Would that require me to upgrade the controller? My plan is to have the server running proxmox and then have numerous different VM’s running various services ie truenas, plex, and anything else I’d like to play with. Sorry again I’m new to this all

thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, S1LENT said:

Would that require me to upgrade the controller? My plan is to have the server running proxmox and then have numerous different VM’s running various services ie truenas, plex, and anything else I’d like to play with. Sorry again I’m new to this all

thanks!

That system will work with a sata ssd in its current config, but the perc 6i will limit you to sata 3gbit speeds, and limits iops due to its slow processor.

 

How much storage space will you need total?

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3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

That system will work with a sata ssd in its current config, but the perc 6i will limit you to sata 3gbit speeds, and limits iops due to its slow processor.

 

How much storage space will you need total?

Uhh I would like around 3-4 tb usable storage. I have an ever growing plex library lol

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4 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

That system will work with a sata ssd in its current config

So if I pop a couple of 2 tb Samsung 870 Evo it should work?

 

also would you suggest using the controller or passing them to the OS and using ZFS? Or both? I don’t know if that possible I have a very limited knowledge of ZFS and almost none with server storage controllers. 

[Needfuldoer]

11 hours ago, S1LENT said:

also would you suggest using the controller or passing them to the OS and using ZFS? Or both? I don’t know if that possible I have a very limited knowledge of ZFS and almost none with server storage controllers. 

ZFS wants direct access to the drives, mostly for health monitoring. RAID controllers hide the physical drives, presenting their virtual drives to the OS.

 

You'll probably need a different SAS controller to do this. See my post earlier about the Dell H310. (Don't get the "mini mono" version, that's a mezzanine card for the R620/R720/R820. Your R710 doesn't have the slot it goes in.)