Dell R420 and non-Dell SSDs

[Jawloms]

Hiya,

 

I have two Dell R420 servers which when I got here used the S110 RAID controller to control the 7.2K hard drives. Not ideal for hosting the file server VMs! I have upgraded one of them to a perc H710 proper controller, a SAS cable, and 4x Dell SAS 10k hard disks. All is working fine. Over the summer I have purchased another perc H710 module, SAS cable and four Samsung 1.92TB Enterprise SSDs for the other one. With everything plugged in, the server won't boot. It hangs when it gets the to part of the POST where it does the RAID card (where it says "Press CTRL R to configure) whist saying "F/W Initializing Devices 100%" for a few minutes, then says "Adapter at base port is not responding. No Adapter.", then hangs at "Initializing firmware interfaces" forever. I left it for the weekend and it hadn't proceeded. If I take all four disks out it will boot, and pressing CTRL R will get me in to the configuring of the RAID. If I re-insert the disks at this point the controller will detect them all and I can configure them, but then after this it won't boot again while the disks are plugged in. I've tried booting with each of the disks in one at a time and it makes no difference. I also have an old R710 here which has a perc 6/i RAID controller built in and the SSDs all work in that one. The R420 is entirely up-to-date with it's firmware. The other R420 is live and I don't currently have the capacity to move servers off it to test scenarios with it.

 

Anyone got any ideas please?

 

Thank you

 

Stuart

[Jawloms]

Anyone got any thoughts please?

[steveg]

You mention the server is up to date, is there a firmware update available for the actual drives?

[Jawloms]

I wasn't able to find any firmware for it.

[Jawloms]

Update on this one. I've managed to migrate servers around quite a bit and now have the SSDs in my HP DL360 Gen9 where they also don't work. Hoping to try some firmware updates on the server to see if that helps. They did work in my somewhat ancient Dell R710 though! I don't want them working in there, I want them in a newer server. Grrrr.......

[BOOT]

Maybe hanging at boot because the disks are GPT format?

[Jawloms]

Maybe hanging at boot because the disks are GPT format?

 

They aren't anything format. They're brand new disks. It's not getting as far as trying to boot from them, just detect them during POST.

 

They are now working in my DL360 Gen9 though!