Dell PowerEdge R720 HDDs & SSDs | Hard Drives | Solid State Drives | Testing with Dell Diagnostics

[@PurcellvillePatriot]

I have a pair of 18 TB Western Digital Golds in my Dell R720xd LFF. They are working great so far. At the time of purchase, the 18 TB drives were the most cost effective option from Amazon.

[@cloudninjas]

We are WD partner. Contact us next time! Thanks for sharing about the 18TB drives.

[@MrSpleenboy]

I've seen other videos that say you can replace the SAS backplane for the LFF and 8 bay SFF models with the equivalent backplane and SAS cables from the R730, and with that you can go from SAS 2 to SAS 3, and get the benefits of the faster transfer speeds. It only works for the 8 bay backplanes, not the 16/24 bay ones, because they use the SAS cables directly, rather than through an extender chip (i.e. each cable directly powers 4 lanes each) I believe in order to get this to work with RAID, you'd either have to replace the H310/H710 RAID controller board with the equivalent from the R730 (so H330/H730), or use a new RAID controller card plugged in to one of the mezzanines. I've never tried this myself, so can't say for sure that it works as advertised... This also begs another question - if you have a SFF variant with a 1x8 bay backplane, can you upgrade that with another 1x8 bay backplane and carry rack? Or do you need to go to the 1x16 bay configuration? Personally, that question is a moot point, because I have the LFF 8 bay variant :)

[@cloudninjas]

That is interesting to hear. We have not tried. Might need to for fun!

[@ICanDoThatToo2]

Yeah, 15.36 TB SSD drives work fine in the LFF version of the R720. I had 4x15 plus 4x7 in my machine, no problems. The drives are still 2.5", so they should work fine in the SFF machine as well. It's got the basic controller in it though; the fastest I got any RAID config to go was 1.2 GB/s, even though the drives could theoretically support 4-8 GB/s.

[@cloudninjas]

Great info. Thank you for sharing!

[@Whiskey7BackRoads]

Thanks for video series. Is it possible to add mSata SSD for a boot drive internally? If so, might make a great video as what options and benefits are out there for boot drives that don't take away from data drives up front.

[@cloudninjas]

Great idea!

[@NoxCodes]

You can now get up to 22tb drives now on 2.5 inch drives

[@cloudninjas]

Do you mean for 3.5" LFF HDDs?

[@dtavares85]

Is it possible to hava more than 7.68TB with SSD´s Disks??

[@cloudninjas]

That is the highest we have installed so I cannot verify with 100% certainty. However, I certainly would not be surprised if someone comments and says they have installed a higher capacity SSD.

[@NoxCodes]

@@cloudninjas i have a sort of interesting solution i have 2 nvmes on a sata board and i plug those into the sata a the front SFF Board its not recommend to do something like this but i just test it and then i have 12tb ssd's in the other slots

[@NoxCodes]

@@dtavares85 Yes i do i have 12tb SSD's

[@CiroAbreu]

Hello. Nice video. Can you explain how can i make a hybrid storage? I intent to use ssd as an cache to boost write speed.

[@stacksmasher]

Hey I just picked up an off lease 720XD and it has 18 SAS drives. Whats the best way to swap them all out? Can I do it one at a time and let the RAID rebuild on its own?

[@prajvas]

I am trying to put together a storage server. I have a 8 slot , R720 . How much storage can I max out from this server ? How much can you max out from the 16 slot server as well ? Thanks in advance

[@leonardotoschi585]

with spinning drives is 38.4 tb, with ssds 122.88 tb (according to this video) with 16 bay

[@prajvas]

@@leonardotoschi585 thank you for your reply !

[@cloudninjas]

Thank you Leonardo!

[@Anne14881]

How do i get IBM System X Sas drives to work on my R720? Your help would be greatly appreciated

[@leonardotoschi585]

I have a 72 gb working hp 15k drive in the library, its a peice of art

[@prajvas]

may i ask , this is the 16 drive R720 ? can you give more details of your setup ?

[@leonardotoschi585]

@@prajvas ? dont understand

[@leonardotoschi585]

@@prajvas no it is from a 380 g5

[@alexzetaeffesse3297]

Thanks for the video, my school got 4 servers for free with just one 8-slots bay and 2x drives each. Just for a test I moved all the drives to one server and I stuffed it with 2x 300Gb 15k + 6x 146Gb SAS 15k. 1) I don't know why, only the first 4 are recognized. I checked all the cables and they seem to be firmly inserted. Also all the 8 drives leds are on at the boot. Would you have any idea? 2) is there a way to remove the enclosure #1 from a server and use it as enclosure #2 in another server? Or what would be the P/N for the 2nd enclosure?

[@alexzetaeffesse3297]

Sorry they were in foreign state, once cleared that, the controller saw them again

[@emredikici]

Is it possible to install HDD as a standalone HDD (non-Raid) on this server? Maybe with Raid-0, would it be possible?

[@cloudninjas]

Yes

[@mujiyati4230]

can a hard drive SATA be installed in backplane SAS? or do I have to replace backplane SATA so I can use hard drive SATA?

[@cloudninjas]

Yes you should be fine.

[@dimitristsoutsouras2712]

Why the 3.5" drives with higher capacity than 2tb aren t as well 10k and they reduced to 7.2k instead?

[@leonardotoschi585]

Im building my workstation and i need a raid controller wich si capable to do a raid 5 of 4 sata disks but not spend much money

[@cloudninjas]

H310 is the way to go for this box.

[@cloudninjas]

And if you want RAID 6 and 60 capable... H710 or H710p won't be that much extra.

[@leonardotoschi585]

This isnt a server, this is a desktop pc (xeon e3 1220 v6 found around dumpsters in enterprises), will the lsi h200 also work on a desktop? Or i need to buy a separate one because i found some generic sata controllers on amazon but the are not raid

[@SpeedyRepost]

Hey, I have a t3600 and I broke the motherboard and the processor I would like to know if I can replace them with a motherboard like a B550 aorus elite v2 or another motherboard for an AMD 5800X (I changed the graphics card I have a gtx1650)

[@SpeedyRepost]

Or a i5 12600KF + Asus TUF B660 or a another motherboard

[@leonardotoschi585]

Check on the site if the case accepts atx motherboards i think it can but not sure

[@PieVsCake]

Be careful when putting SSD's in these.. my R720 did NOT like the WD's I put in but was ok with Crucial.. check the net or buy one to test before you fill em all up

[@leonardotoschi585]

Ssds are too much for me, i only got my first ssd 120gb for nexcloud and caching but i found it in an old server . Always going with 10ks (the ssds i use are kingston ssdnow 240)

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

Ok, slow down your speech and use it as a teaching moment. Not how fast you can get the video done.