# Dell R710 drive replacement oddity.



## rhynes (Aug 14, 2006)

Have a Dell R710 with a SATA 3 drive Raid 5 - one of the drives died. Ordered up a new Dell Constellation and when I popped it in, error with a failure was a result. 
Odd part is when entering the Perc on boot, the drive would show missing - but the Dell openmanage showed spun up and failed. Ok, let the distributer know and they sent a replacement - same. Third drive, same failure. 

Out of frustration, I bought a new Seagate EXOS drive, the server spun it up and rebuilt the Raid. It's not a certified drive of course, but the server is fine. 

Anyone else face this? I've never seen 3 new drives as DOA, and one came from a different source.


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## Triple6 (Dec 26, 2002)

Most likely a compatibility issue with firmware or the interface rather then 3 DOA drives. Were the Dell and EXOS drives the same interface type; SAS vs SATA? RAID controller firmware up to date?


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## rhynes (Aug 14, 2006)

Firmwares all updated, 2 of the drives had the same firmware as the original failed drive, and one of the good drives in the raid 5. All SATA drives in this one server, the other 4 rack mount servers have SAS drives.


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## Triple6 (Dec 26, 2002)

Likely a compatibility issue then. My Dell T320 shows an error for 2 of the 3 SSD's I have in it, but luckily they do still work. But I've had other servers that would simply flag drives as bad and not use them when they were fine; switched to different drives and all good.


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## rhynes (Aug 14, 2006)

Weird... I know for a while Dell firmware required certified drives, but they had to back out of that. Just found it odd, 3 drive DOA or incompatible, all certified Dell Constellations, none worked. The EXOS is still flagged as non-certified, but works fine. Oh well, it is what it is.


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## zx10guy (Mar 30, 2008)

Dell servers have never required specific or certified drives. The only time the drives need to be certified is if you want the drives to be managed from the Lifecycle controller to get firmware updates for the drive BIOS. I've been using non Dell sourced drives on my own personal servers from the old Poweredge 650s to the T410s to my current servers consisting of R730s, R730xd's, and FC630s/FD332s in my FX2 chassis.


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## Triple6 (Dec 26, 2002)

They may not require certified drives but they can be picky. None of my drives, SSD or HDD, in my Dell are Dell branded but a couple of them have issues, blink red but work fine.


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## zx10guy (Mar 30, 2008)

I haven't seen any issues with any of my customers/clients or myself. One client used Samsung's consumer grade EVO SSDs in their Dell 12th/13th gen servers without any issues. I've used non supported Micron SAS SSDs without issues in my R730s.

If there are any issues with a drive working with a PERC, it's most likely an issue with the drive's BIOS. And take my word, it is not a may not but Dell servers do not require specific certified drives. I've had deep level access into non public information around the technical specs and designs of various Dell servers.


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