Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers

Thank you very much for your comments and feedback regarding exclusive use of Dell drives. It is common practice in enterprise storage solutions to limit drive support to only those drives which have been qualified by the vendor. In the case of Dell's PERC RAID controllers, we began informing customers when a non-Dell drive was detected with the introduction of PERC5 RAID controllers in early 2006. With the introduction of the PERC H700/H800 controllers, we began enabling only the use of Dell qualified drives. There are a number of benefits for using Dell qualified drives in particular ensuring a positive experience and protecting our data. While SAS and SATA are industry standards there are differences which occur in implementation. An analogy is that English is spoken in the UK, US and Australia. While the language is generally the same, there are subtle differences in word usage which can lead to confusion. This exists in storage subsystems as well. As these subsystems become more capable, faster and more complex, these differences in implementation can have greater impact. Benefits of Dell's Hard Disk and SSD drives are outlined in a white paper on Dell's web site at http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/dell-hard-drives-pov.pdf -----Original Message----- From: linux-poweredge-bounces-Lists On Behalf Of Philip Tait Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 4:31 PM To: linux-poweredge-Lists Subject: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers I just received my first Gen11 server, R710, with H700 PERC. I removed the supplied drives, and installed 4 Barracuda ES.2s. After doing a "Clear Configuration" in the pre-boot RAID setup utility, I can perform no operation with the drives - they are marked as "blocked". Is Dell preventing the use of 3rd-party HDDs now? Thanks for any enlightenment. Philip J. Tait http://subarutelescope.org _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge at dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq