Dell PowerEdge 2950 D22

Owner	Space
Status	Working
Location	Server room
Tool	No
Tool category

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Description

One of the spare PowerEdge 2950's marked D22 could be interesting for storage purposes, but there's some restrictions/things to consider.

Specs

Dual 1.6GHz Xeon quad core
Perc 5/i connected to 6 drive bays (SAS or SATA, see below)
BIOS version 1.37 (we should probably update)

Perc 5/i, drives and RAID levels

No JBOD

The card doesn't do JBOD. It's running Dell firmware. There are reports that running generic LSI firmware will result in JBOD capabilities. First attempts to reflash failed (firmware flash software could not find the card).

Hardware RAID

We could do hardware RAID since we've got enough spare parts (should be tested, stick disks in another PE 2950 with same RAID controller, preferably with same firmware). The Dell firmware can do following RAID levels: 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50.

Disks

The card does take SATA drives (with or without adapter card, of which we have 3) but SAS and SATA cannot be mixed in the same virtual disk. This means that we either have to get more SAS drives or we should go all SATA from start.

SAS

There are 6 500GB SAS drives available. Trouble with using them is that replacement is expensive.

SATA

Seems to work just fine without the adapter. You just put the SATA disks in the SAS position in the trays. We could for instance do a RAID 5 on 5 disks (500GB disks will give you 1.82TB) and have one hot spare.

Useful links

[1], it has some dead links and info about 5/i and 6/i, but it's a nice read.