So I have a Poweredge T710 with 16 drive bays and 32GB ram. This is running ESXi 6.7. I bought this from eBay not long ago for me to learn in a home lab environment.

It has 12 drives filled up with 600GB HP SAS disks that just worked out the box (well the box from eBay LOL) but I have been given 4x 1TB Seagate Constellation.2 disks and when I put them in the spare disk bays all I get is the power light and no flashing or activity.

When I reboot the server and do a CTRL+E to get into the raid configurations the new disks aren't even showing up?

I'm totally new to all this. Can you help me get my disks recognised please? I have also posted on Dell support site but getting no replies there. So thought I would try the old trusty LQ for help.

This is the info I have on the disks:

ST91000640SS

FW: QF05

SN: 9XG6JB6S

RAID manufacturers tend to be strict about what drives and firmware they support. One good reason is error recovery. A drive for home use will keep trying to recover a failed read, but an enterprise RAID drive will likely have a set time limit, so it can recover by reading redundant data. Dell should have information on drives and firmware supported by your PERC model.

https://www.dell.com/community/Power...ts/m-p/7713563

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't know anything about Dell servers having worked mainly on HP Proliant stuff back in the day but you may like to check out the T710 Technical guide book. It may not cover your generation of system but check out page 37 onward for details of supported storage, unfortunately 1Tb drives are not mentioned. Your description implies you have the 16 slot 2.5" drive backplane. I'd reckon the RAID card doesn't support 1Tb drives. The PDF I've indicated doesn't allow for 600Gb SAS disks either hence my remark about the system generation; maybe the Technical book is for an older model than yours or there is a newer firmware upgrade to the RAID card to allow larger disks? The System Specs give a max storage size of 24TB which seems to contradict this, but check out the allowable configurations as well.

Best I can do I'm afraid, hope it helps.

Play bonny!

I would suspect that the raid card will allow only matching disks. It is impossible to properly assemble a raid array if the device/partition sizes are not the same, and the hardware raid controller probably enforces that. It also could be that the controller will only see devices from the same hardware manufacturer. Your new disks are seagate and the original apparently are HP.

As computersavvy says, you can't mix disk sizes in a raid but... A RAID controller card should be able to handle your 12 600Gb drives and 4 1Tb drives as two volumes providing the drives used in each volume are the same.

Note that HP no longer make drives but re-badge Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi, Western Digital, etc, drives as their own. The disk firmware is used to make them compatible with one another.

I've also come across problems making up hardware RAIDs (though I'm talking Sun Microsystems T3 arrays using SCSI disks) where even though the disk had the same capacity and serial No. the RAID wouldn't build because the drive geometry was different; different no of heads, sectors, etc. I had to re-specify the geometry to be the same as the working disks to enable the spare to be incorporated in the array. Probably not a problem encountered these days.

My

Play Bonny!