I got a new Dell PERC H740P for £30. It is a nice card, with 8GB cache and a battery backup. I am going to use it for a NAS in a HP Z440 box with a Xeon 2690v4 processor and 32GB Ram. I have a new 800gb SAS3 enterprise SSD (another £30 bargain) and 4 x 4tb SAS3 enterprise drives to use in the box (yet more £30 bargains). I will have a couple of spare 4tb SAS3 drives to use as spares. These drives have pristine platters after 5 years use. I have all this data, movies, my work, software, backups, backed up elsewhere. This NAS will allow me to access it all online.
I would like to check I have understood the concepts correctly. I expect to use Raid 5 for the 4x4tb drives, so one can fail while preserving data. So I would create a raid 5 virtual disk for all four 4tb drives. There seem to be no benefits for using the 800gb SSD with Raid, so I set it up as a non Raid disk, to be used for the operating system(s). I will probably use Ubuntu for the OS.
I also have a Dell 5820. I can access the card by hitting F12 at boot time and I set up the 800gb SAS3 SSD no problem. Then I took the drive and card and got it working in the HP Z440 no problem. But the 4tb hard drives are ignored over there, as the 800gb SSD was ignored before I initialised it on the Dell machine.
Do I have to initialize drives on the Dell machine before transferring or will I be able to download or will perccli (can be downloaded from Dell web site for linux or windows) let me initialize and work with drives on the HP machine? Will the card be using BBU and other features when it is on the HP?
I have a problem getting all the drives into the 5820. I could try to work around this by figuring out how to disable the case alarm. But it is easier if I know perccli will work on the HP machine.
What happens if I want to replace one of the 4tb SAS hard drives later? Can I just swap it out or will the Dell PERC H740P throw a show if it finds a drive with a different serial number, and send me back to configure on a Dell machine again?
I would like to check I have understood the concepts correctly. I expect to use Raid 5 for the 4x4tb drives, so one can fail while preserving data. So I would create a raid 5 virtual disk for all four 4tb drives. There seem to be no benefits for using the 800gb SSD with Raid, so I set it up as a non Raid disk, to be used for the operating system(s). I will probably use Ubuntu for the OS.
I also have a Dell 5820. I can access the card by hitting F12 at boot time and I set up the 800gb SAS3 SSD no problem. Then I took the drive and card and got it working in the HP Z440 no problem. But the 4tb hard drives are ignored over there, as the 800gb SSD was ignored before I initialised it on the Dell machine.
Do I have to initialize drives on the Dell machine before transferring or will I be able to download or will perccli (can be downloaded from Dell web site for linux or windows) let me initialize and work with drives on the HP machine? Will the card be using BBU and other features when it is on the HP?
I have a problem getting all the drives into the 5820. I could try to work around this by figuring out how to disable the case alarm. But it is easier if I know perccli will work on the HP machine.
What happens if I want to replace one of the 4tb SAS hard drives later? Can I just swap it out or will the Dell PERC H740P throw a show if it finds a drive with a different serial number, and send me back to configure on a Dell machine again?