storage dell internal h200
- SAS HBA card with customised Dell firmware
- Internal cards have two 4x 6Gb SAS ports (24Gb per physical socket)
- External cards have two 4x 6Gb SAS ports (aka. miniSAS-26 or SFF8088 connectors)
- LSI SAS 2008 chipset; standard LSI drivers and management tools can be used
- H200 (internal) card usually ships with LSI-IR (integrated RAID) firmware, supporting RAID 0/1/10
- HBA (external) card usually ships with LSI-IT (initiator/target) firmware, which doesn't support RAID
- Both firmware revisions support booting via INT19 BIOS hook (i.e. legacy BIOS boot, not UEFI compatible)
- Dell cards will accept Dell or standard LSI firmware (which will invalidate warranty)
- Press CTRL+C on boot to configure the card
- Setup RAID type, boot volume, etc. for the card
- Exit and press CTRL+ALT+DEL to reboot
- Firmware can be downloaded to card using DOS boot environment, or from Linux
- Cards usually ship on latest firmware, and rarely need updating
- Download new firmware from Dell support site.
- Upgrading firmware writes a new image to the SAS card; reboot the server to apply the new version
- In very rare circumstances, a new RAID firmware may not support an existing RAID group. Backup data before upgrading firmware.
- If using the Linux update binaries, execute the update package on the server. The command line switches
-f -n -qwill cause the update packages to run automatically without prompting or rebooting. Firmware update from Linux takes around 1 minute to apply. - RAID configurations are written to disks and detected automatically as the server POSTs - RAID card does not store the disk configuration in non-volatile memory.
- Dell RAID cards take on the support coverage of the server they're installed in. Open calls for the containing server
- RAID1 performance is typically poor as card only supports direct-I/O (no RAM on SAS card), particularly with slow disks
- Dell only support connecting to Dell storage devices (although LSI hardware usually works well with most SAS devices, including SAS switches)