Hard Drives

Depending on your chassis and backplane, your system has one of the following configurations:

Sixteen 2.5-inch drive bays

Eight 3.5-inch drive bays

All chassis support hot-swappable SAS and SATA hard drives, and the 2.5- inch–bay chassis also supports hot-swappable SSD hard drives in systems with integrated PERC controllers.

All drives are installed at the front of the system and connect to the system board through the SAS backplane. Hard drives are supplied in special hot- swappable hard-drive carriers that fit in the hard-drive bays.

CAUTION: Before attempting to remove or install a drive while the system is running, see the documentation for the storage controller card to ensure that the host adapter is configured correctly to support hot-swap drive removal and insertion.

CAUTION: Do not turn off or reboot your system while the drive is being formatted. Doing so can cause a drive failure.

NOTE: Use only drives that have been tested and approved for use with the SAS backplane board.

When you format a hard drive, allow enough time for the formatting to be completed. Be aware that high-capacity hard drives can take a number of hours to format.

Mixed SAS/SATA Hard-Drive Configurations

Mixed hard-drive configurations of SAS and SATA drives are allowed. In this configuration, two SAS drives must be installed in hard-drive slots 0 and 1 only. Up to six SATA drives may be installed in the remaining slots.

Mixed 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch configurations of SAS and SATA drives are also supported in the 3.5-inch–bay chassis only. In this configuration, two 10,000- RPM 2.5-inch SAS drives installed in 3.5-inch adapters must be used in hard- drive slots 0 and 1 only. The remaining hard drives must be 3.5 inches in size and must be either all SAS or all SATA drives.

Installing System Components

89

Page 89
Image 89
Dell T710 owner manual Hard Drives, Mixed SAS/SATA Hard-Drive Configurations