Hello all! I just got myself a Dell Perc H200, and I want to move all my drives over to it. What is the process? Is this ok or do I need to leave all the drives on the original ports?

Just now, [email protected] said:

Hello all! I just got myself a Dell Perc H200, and I want to move all my drives over to it. What is the process? Is this ok or do I need to leave all the drives on the original ports?

unRAID tracks disks by serial number, the SATA port makes no difference.  Just connect your drives to the H200 (it does have IT firmware, correct?) and everything should function as it did before.  If you have any SSDs, I would leave them connected to MB ports for TRIM support.  

11 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

(it does have IT firmware, correct?)

If not then it won't work as before, so make sure you do your homework on this.

Thanks. I'm going to put the IT firmware on it. However I was told the Dell Perc H200 may work fine without it?

1 hour ago, [email protected] said:

Thanks. I'm going to put the IT firmware on it. However I was told the Dell Perc H200 may work fine without it?

I assume you picked up the Dell H200 used?  I have a Dell H310.  The H200 and H310 are identical functionality-wise except for the location of the mini-SAS connectors.  On the H200 the connectors are on the top front of the card.  On the H310 they are at the end of the card.

 

These Dell cards are almost always configured as server RAID cards by default (unless someone sold it flashed with IT firmware).  Most of the used ones you can readily acquire are pulled from decommissioned servers and have RAID firmware.  You don't want to run this card in RAID mode or unRAID will not recognize any attached drives. As was the case with my Dell H310, it needs to be crossflashed with IT firmware in order to work in unRAID.

 

There are some LSI/Broadcom cards (and the H200/H310 are based on an LSI chip) that do not need to be flashed with IT firmware and work as-is with unRAID.  This is usually not the case with the Dell variants.

 

There is a thread in these forums about flashing these cards to IT mode as well and many other step-by-step resources available through a Google search.