Dell Perc 4/DC Dell Powervault 220s questions

fr0stsp1re

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May 21, 2013
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Hello,

My name is Tyrannosaurs Rex and I have the above mentioned Items that are as old as I *lol*

No seriously, I do have those items and they are in operation with Ultra320 EMMs. They work fine with the 36GB 15k Seagate Cheetahs at 320 speeds but when I tried to fit the Powervault 220s with a full bank of IBM 146GB 15k drives I have issues.

The drives all appear good. I can see them, I can low level format them and I can spin them up and make an array out of them. When I go to initialize the array I get ERROR flashing on the BIOs util for the PERC 4/DC card.

I cant seem to find any good documentation on them. I see that there are some being sold with 300GB drives in them so I don't understand why this is happening.

Is there some sort of limitations to these units? Are there drives not supported? Anyone ever work with these soon to be relics of the century?
 

fr0stsp1re

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May 21, 2013
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Oh yes, I forgot to mention that I had flashed the controller and the backplane to the latest firmware.

I just found the manual for the Powervault buried on Dells FTP and it does say it supports both spindle speeds up to 146GB. But I also see them on eBay with 300GB and read that they can hold 4tb each with the 300gb drives in place.

Granted they are not SSD drives they can still hold down the fort adn are cheap enough that I want to get these going for an iSCSI datastore on a VM environment. As common as these units were I am hoping some seasoned sysadmin had some dealings with these and could shed some light.
 

fr0stsp1re

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May 21, 2013
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10,520


I think I already mentioned that I flashed the PERC. The error says just that: ERROR. If it spit out a code I would not be here asking this question I would be on some knowledge base looking up the error code *LOL*

It would be nice if the BIOs of the PERC card would spit out something a bit more definitive than a generic ERROR flashing on the screen *LOL*