

- How to use the dell perc h200 config utility software#
- How to use the dell perc h200 config utility download#
I populated three of the drive bays of my PowerEdge R515:

Let’s see what FreeNAS has to say about my disks: Would you like to flash anyways? Hit y for yes.It will interrupt you to ask you a question. This is the part where we replace the Dell HBA FW with LSI 9211-8i FWīoot from USB and run the following command to flash the LSI firmware:.s2fp19.exe -o -sasadd 500xxxxxxxxxxxxx (replace this address with the one you wrote down in the first steps).Next, you need to run this command and append the SAS address you wrote down earlier. We are going to run the following command to flash Dell HBA FW: This is the part where we flash the Dell HBA firmware.Reboot your server and boot back into the FreeDOS USB. We will be overwriting this later with the LSI firmware. Since it failed, we will prep the card for the Dell HBA firmware. If the result is a fail, you can move on to the next step. Run this command before we flash the DELL 6GBPS SAS HBA firmware. Write it down, take a photo, remember it, whatever! Run this command and hit enter until you see your SAS address. You will need this later during flashing, so this is crucial. In PERC Configuration Management, click Clear Configuration and confirm to delete existing disk groups and any data on that disk group. In the PERC Configuration Utility Dashboard View under Actions, click Configure.
The first thing you’ll need to do is write down your SAS address of the PERC H310 card. In Device Settings, select Integrated RAID Controller 1: Dell PERCHow to use the dell perc h200 config utility download#
Once you have your FreeDOS bootable USB, download and extract the LSI Firmware files to the root of the USB drive, overwriting any files from the FreeDOS Rufus provided. You can easily create a bootable FreeDOS USB with Rufus.Since I use FreeNAS, Xpenology, and other HBA-backed systems of software-defined storage, conventional server configurations or stock firmware don’t always make the cut.įor this guide I am using FreeDOS to perform the necessary commands. It’s sometimes cheaper (and questionably easier) to flash a PERC to LSI FW rather than buy an HBA for your storage appliance.
How to use the dell perc h200 config utility software#
It would appear as though this piece-of-crap RAID controller might actually be of some use after all!įor those who stumbled upon this article by some mythical way with no knowledge of why you would want to do this to your PERC H310, well, the goal here is to present all the physical disks, which are connected to the RAID controller, individually to the operating system of choice (for creating software RAID, ZFS, etc) which would normally require a host bus adapter. A few of my servers have come with them, and I never really ended up using them. The PERC H310 is a pretty standard and widely available PCI express RAID controller. If I have a server go crazy on me, I just tell Veeam to revert the OS volume, or the server to its previous state and pull out the toasted system's virtual disks to copy what data I need off of them.Flash PERC H310 to IT mode for use with FreeNAS, UnRAID, etc. (Then again, I work with local storage so rarely these days maybe I'm forgetting something).Īs long as you have image/block/VM level backups with VSS this isn't really that big of a deal anymore. You waste some space if you don't have thin provisioning and slightly increase the management, but I don't see why a dedicated RAID pair is needed for this. You can carve multiple LUN's out of the same RAID group (Unless I"m missing something with PERC controllers) to prevent volume level corruption from taking out your data drive. This is exactly what the NSA and DOD do with their systems. If speed is your goal, John is right, but if security and data protection is your goal, I would advise separation. My job requires data protection and security and it is far easier to do both when the data is on a separate system. Corrupt your OS (never happens, does it?) and you could lose it all. The only problem I have with John's suggestion to build one RAID 10 array and combine the OS and data on a single drive is data protection.
