Re: Dell PERC H700/H800

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 1:11 PM, James Mansion
<james(at)mansionfamily(dot)plus(dot)com> wrote:
> Matthew Wakeling wrote:
>>
>> Just a heads up - apparently the more recent Dell RAID controllers will no
>> longer recognise hard discs that weren't sold through Dell.
>>
>>
>> http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/dell_perc_11th_gen_qualified_hdds_only/
>>
>> As one of the comments points out, that kind of makes them no longer SATA
>> or SAS compatible, and they shouldn't be allowed to use those acronyms any
>> more.
>>
>> Matthew
>>
> I think that's potentially FUD.  Its all about 'Dell qualified drives'.  I
> can't see anything that suggests that Dell will OEM drives and somehow tag
> them so that the drive must have come from them.  Of course they are big
> enough that they could have special BIOS I guess, but I read it that the
> drive types (and presumably revisions thereof) had to be recognised by the
> controller from a list, which presumably can be reflashed, which is not
> quite saying that if some WD enterprise drive model is 'qualified' then you
> have to buy it from Dell..
>
> Do you have any further detail?

In the post to the dell mailing list (
http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2010-February/041335.html
) It was pointed out that the user had installed Seagate ES.2 drives,
which are enterprise class drives that have been around a while and
are kind of the standard SATA enterprise clas drives and are listed so
by Seagate:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/servers/barracuda_es/barracuda_es.2

These drives were marked as BLOCKED and unusable by the system.

The pdf linked to in the dell forum specifically states that the hard
drives are loaded with a dell specific firmware. The PDF seems
otherwise free of useful information, and is mostly a marketing tool
as near as I can tell.