Recommendations for an R720

[BLinux]

I did some digging and almost all of the servers we get have H7xx cards. Why is it that these (I assume) higher end cards are less capable than the 3xx series?

I wouldn't say H700 < H310 or anything like that. They are just different use cases, and many places are still much more comfortable with hardware RAID than something software based.

 

[Edgeman]

Yeah all of our stuff is hardware raid still. Unless you count the witchcraft that NetApp does as software raid. Which I would say it is except it requires the NetApp hardware...

 

[DanielWood]

Yeah, checked the cable there's no printing on it at all. The power wires to the backplane are yellow/grey/black, they aren't very long, will be a bit cumbersome.
I wish there was a better way to run OS drives separate from the array in this thing. I did some digging, there's PCIE cards and stuff that may do the job, but the pricing isn't great for what you get.

Well, this piqued my curiosity, so I tried powering some SATA drives on 12V only. Neither the 2.5 WD Raptor nor the Intel X25M would power with 12V only. Intel SSD worked with 5V only, WD Raptor did not spin up(As expected, Raptor should behave like a standard 3.5" Drive for power).

So, if I were trying to do this in the R720, I would replace the optical power cable with a lower gauge wire, punch down SATA connectors, and call it a day.

 

[Edgeman]

Hmm, thanks for the info. I should probably verify that these Constellation.2 drives power up on 5v only.

 

[Edgeman]

I may have access to an IBM FRU 46M0861 (LSI SAS9220-8i)ServeRaid M10158 , would this be suitable for the purpose of driving the backplane in JBOD/ZFS ?

 

[DanielWood]

I may have access to an IBM FRU 46M0861 (LSI SAS9220-8i)ServeRaid M10158 , would this be suitable for the purpose of driving the backplane in JBOD/ZFS ?

Yes. It's pretty much a dell h200. Same caveat as the HP H220 and fans.

 

[Edgeman]

I'll have to research how well FreeBSD can control the fans in an R720.