Hello,
Hope someone can help me! We have just purchased 4 x R730xd servers for use with Storage Spaces Direct. The Dell Enterprise Product specialist specified a HBA330 storage controller as a normal RAID controller wouldn't be suitable for Storage Spaces Direct. We have fully populated the 12 x 3.5" front bays, the 4 x 3.5" internal bays and the rear 2.5" bays.
Our vision was to use the 2 rear drives (2 x 300GB 10K SAS) for the OS, however ideally I would have liked to make this a hardware RAID 1, so a drive failure doesn't require an OS re-install (and it's easy for our on-site techs to just replace the drives). The Dell specialist said specifying two controllers was not possible, however I don't understand why not.
My question is, am I able to add another RAID controller and connect this to the rear backplane? I am able to do this to a certain extent, but when my second controller is connected, the status lights indicate an error and the following error is displayed on startup:
iDRAC Settings:
CBL0009: Backplane 0 connector A0 is not connected.
CBL0009: Backplane 1 connector A2 is not connected.
This is because (I think) the white signal cable is still connected to the system board from the rear backplane, as this appears to be required for the 2.5" drives to power up with the system. I have moved the SAS connector from the front backplane to the 2nd RAID controller and I can see the drives as well as set up the RAID array, just with the errors above and the diagnostic display always showing an error on the front of the server (which is what I would like to stop!). The 2nd RAID controller I have added is a Dell PERC H200.
Does anyone have any ideas? My ideas are...:
Can I reconfigure the front backplane/System board to not expect the rear backplane to be connected?
Will a newer RAID controller be properly recognised by the BIOS and therefore recognise that the backplane is plugged in elsewhere?
Any help would be gratefully received!
Thanks,
Tom.