PowerEdge 2900

[durff4]

Anyone have experience with the perc 6/i controller. I'm looking for some 1TB drives and not at Dells price that people had had luck with working.

I'm going to return the 4 Seagate 1.5TB drives I have now since they aren't noticed in the BIOS. I'm told I need to go with the Enterprise class of HD's to avoid problems.

Thanks

 

[wuzy]

Make sure you've updated the BIOS of your PERC 6/i to the latest. Available from Dell's website.
All PERC cards I've met works great with off-shelve drives.

I've seen people use a few 1.5TB Seagate with PERC 6/i before no problem. I personally run 4x1TB Seagate 7200.11 ST31000340AS on PERC 5/i (flashed to LSI MegaRAID) and has given me no problems so far.
The enterprise class are worth the investment when used in business environment(besides 5yr warranty) as they are physically the same as desktop class, but with firmware tuned for stricter ECC to avoid data corruption.

In my professional opinion as long as the HDDs in the rack are properly dampened and well cooled then the chance data corruption is very little even with desktop-class drives. The enterprise-class drives just goes that extra mile if budget allows, which I find spending that $ on more reliable defenses(RAID6 or 10+ incremental backup) instead is better.

 

[durff4]

I've got the latest Firmware and drivers loaded up today. The problem I'm having with the 1.5TB drives is they aren't being loaded by the perc controler. I look under physical drives and there is nothing there aside from my current 4 drives.

The drives aren't even lighting up on boot aside from a quick flash. I was going to take them back to Fry's tonight and pick up some Caviar Black 1TB drives, but those aren't really considered enterprise class.

These won't be used in a business these are going to be holding a lot of media for my media machines.