Hi Everyone,

 

I am new to unraid. Just booted to the OS for the first time tonight. I recently acquired a Dell r520 from a 'friend' and had a few questions running unraid.

 

1. The perc was removed from the server. I have the bios set to run ahci (not raid mode). Can I just add nas drives to the caddys --> the backplane then configure those in unraid OR do I need to buy myself a raid controller? I am familiar with how unraid works and the fact that you DO NOT need a raid controller. My question is whether I need the perc for this to even work.

 

2. Cache Drive: My plan is to remove the DVD ROM and add a caddy with an SSD for this. Does this seem like the right plan?

3. Any suggestions for running unraid on this server?

 

Thanks,

X

 

 

Edited July 20, 20196 yr by Xan

bump

8 hours ago, Xan said:

bump

Well I can tell you that the drive caddy conversion works on my R710 and my R410 so that issue should be covered I'm not familiar with the R520 but if you removed the perc6 controller how did you connect the backplane I removed my perc6 and installed an HBA flashed it to IT mode and all is good and if you go that route although I did not try it I have read that you cannot mount the HBA in the PCIe slot that the perc6 was in something along the lines of it being proprietary

 

And a word of note my usb ports are sata 2 if that means anything to you not sure if the R520 is sata 2 or 3 not sure it will really make much of a difference in unRAID

Edited June 14, 20197 yr by mrbilky

Try googling    unraid  dell r520   as Google does a much, much better job of searching this forum than the forum's search engine.  (While I could post up a couple of links, you should more quickly find what you are looking for if you searched the result yourself. )

12 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Try googling    unraid  dell r520   as Google does a much, much better job of searching this forum than the forum's search engine.  (While I could post up a couple of links, you should more quickly find what you are looking for if you searched the result yourself. )

Appreciate it. I have googled a bit and the search on the forums is not the greatest. I had some questions because the way the board is configured did not make sense. The backplane plugs straight into what appears to be a sata a-d plug on the motherboard. My assumption is that disk 0,1,2,3 can run without a perc in the sata a-d slot, while 4,5,6,7 will need some sort of controller. 

 

There are also 2 SAS plugs for SAS-A and SAS-B on the backplane that go straight to the motherboard. Can I run these as regular sata and bypass the need for a perc?

 

 

 

 

14 hours ago, mrbilky said:

Well I can tell you that the drive caddy conversion works on my R710 and my R410 so that issue should be covered I'm not familiar with the R520 but if you removed the perc6 controller how did you connect the backplane I removed my perc6 and installed an HBA flashed it to IT mode and all is good and if you go that route although I did not try it I have read that you cannot mount the HBA in the PCIe slot that the perc6 was in something along the lines of it being proprietary

 

And a word of note my usb ports are sata 2 if that means anything to you not sure if the R520 is sata 2 or 3 not sure it will really make much of a difference in unRAID

Thank you! I posted some pics above.

In case someone finds this.

 

1. You can run 4 drives from the backplane to the SATA/8087 port on the Mobo. Swap the optical for an SSD and run it fine with no additions.

 

2. Caddy swap works fine. Auto detects in #1 above.

 

3. After flashing my perc h310 to IT mode. I ran a comparison with the s110 onboard non-raid passthrough then after the flash ran it again on the IT mode h310. For some reason I expected them to differ but in fact they were nearly identical. 

Edited July 20, 20196 yr by Xan

Just got a r520 with the h710 mini on it.  Yay the h710 mini is flashable to IT mode now.  But my question is, do you have an how to, or picture of how it look the optical drive replacement to a SSD drive?   Want to add a SSD drive as my cache drive for Unraid