Q: What hard drive can I put into a dell r510
A: Apparently 2gb is the maximum you can put into a dell server, not sure if that's with Perc 6i only or also with the H700. Even then, there are certain harddrives that are preferred and others that won't even be recognized correctly.
Need to find a list of supported drives for r510 etc and why others might work, but not be recommended. Need to find a list of sata3 and sata6 capabilities too. TODO
My favorite reddit r/homelab/ actually answered this, I copied their answer down below so I can find it faster in the future. Blogger quotes screws up everything so the rest of this Answer is directly from r/homelab. But for me and my Perc6/i it basically forces me to find some 2tb WD RE4's YYS which are slowly going out of production. Below doesn't mention what is available with the Perc 6'i though. TODO
Dell Perc6/i
Lots of Dell servers still have Perc6/i Raid cards in them.
These cards will not be able to use a drive over 2Tb and Dell have no plans of ever updating the firmware to support the larger drives we want to use.
If your server comes with a Perc6/i and you want to use larger drives then you will need to upgrade it to a newer card, the 2 most popular options if you want to stay with Dell are the H200 or the H700.
Now which out of the 2 you want will depend on your needs, -if you are going to be running FreenNAS or any such solution for your storage you will want to go with the H200 as this card supports JBOD mode which is what you will want to pass SMART data through to the OS, The H700 does not support this mode so will not be suitable for these types of storage solution. If you are interested in Hardware Raid from the card then both cards support this, the H700 is the better of the 2 cards as it supports both a BBWC and Raid Levels 0,1,5,6,10,50,60 Whereas the H200 does not support BBWC and will only do Raid levels 0,1,10.
If you are not using drives over 2Tb is possible to use the Perc6/i but be aware the card is only a 3Gb/s card where as the other 2 are both 6 Gb/s.
Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using (WD) Western Digital RE drives
A: Power Consumption and sound seem to be large problems for WD RE drives and interestingly enough the link below talks about Red Pro drives and how similar they are in power requirements and sound to the RE drives vs the normal REDs. I've got dual 870w gold power supplies so power shouldn't be an issue, but I'm not looking to go broke paying to run a server either. I can supply it, but do I want to.
The main problem for me is going to be sound volume. I need some quiet drives
Found the jackpot...by looking where I'm supposed to look.
