[SOLVED] DELL Precision T7500 / Win 10 Pro PERC H710 compatibility

[mipi]

Hi guys, just bought a refurbished DELL T7500 from a computer company that sells new and refurbished PCs and workstations.
Originally my T7500 had 2xXeon E5620 / nVidia Quadro 4000 2GB / 48GB RAM / 500GB WD hard drive / Windows 10 Pro 64bit. Upon purchase I asked them to install OS on an SSD (Kingston SA400S37/120G 120GB) so this is how it came to me. I installed another hard disk drive, a WD10EFRX 1TB RED NAS SATA3. All these run on the built-in SAS controller.

As I am new to these DELL workstations but impressed of the built quality of this machine and it's reliability, I started to learn as much as possible about it and how to make it up to date fast (looking to edit 4K) In the future I am going to replace the Quadro 4000 with a K4200 and I have already bought 2 new Xeon X5690.

I came upon a few threads here and read that it's a good move to ad a RAID controller to make the disk system faster from SATA II 3/GB/s to SATA III 6/GB/s. I don't need any RAID configurations. I will set the disks on no-RAID. I never had a RAID controller and know almost nothing about them so I have a few questions.

Will a PERC H710 or a LSI 9260/8i work in Windows 10 Pro and does it matter if the RAID card is pci express 3.0 on the DELL 2.0 motherboard;

In the DELL PERC user's guide page 10, operating systems are:

"Supported Operating Systems
The PERC H310, H710, and H710P cards support the following operating systems:•
Microsoft Windows Server 2012•
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 including Hyper-V virtualization•
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and later•
Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.8 and later (32-bit and 64-bit)•
Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.2 and later (64-bit)•
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version 10 SP4 (64-bit)•
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version 11 SP2 (64-bit)•
VMware ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1 Update 2 and later•
VMware ESXi 5.0 and later"

On the LSI user guide (February 2013 - 41450-04, Rev. B) at 1.5.2 supported OS are:

"Operating System Support
The MegaRAID 6Gb/s SAS RAID controllers support the following operating systems:
 Microsoft® Windows® 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP x64, Windows Server 2003 (x86), Windows Server 2003
(x64), Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Window Server 2012
 Red Hat® Linux™
 SuSE® SLES
 Novell® NetWare®
 SCO® OpenServer®
 SCO UnixWare®
 Solaris®
 FreeBSD®
 VMware®"

and at 1.6.3:

"1.6.3 SATA III Features
The following list describes the SATA III features of the RAID controllers:
 They support SATA III data transfers of 3Gb/s (for LSISAS2108-based controllers) and 6Gb/s (for LSISAS2208-based controllers).
 They support STP data transfers of 3Gb/s.
 They provide a serial, point-to-point storage interface.
 They simplify cabling between devices.
 They eliminate the master-slave construction used in parallel ATA.
 They permit addressing of multiple SATA targets through an expander.
 They permit multiple initiators to address a single target (in a failover configuration) through an expander."

I understand only a few things but should I look for a RAID card with the LSISAS2208 for the SATA III 6Gb/s; (The DELL PERC H710 has this 2208 chipset)

Thanks in advance all of you.

 

[popatim]

If you're going to edit 4k on HDD's then you will need them in raid or go all SSD IMO.

 

[mipi]

Thank you. I guess you are right so I will consider that.
As I need to buy either the PERC H710 or an LSI 9265-8i / 9266-8- / 9270/8i, will I face Win10Pro compatibility issues;

 

[popatim]

SSD prices are falling fast, 1TB Samsung 860 evo's for under $130 currently.
I would suggest using SSD where possible and large Harddrives for final storage.

But to answer your question, I know of no issues with the LSi cards and the Perc I am unsure of but according to This Post there are no win10 drivers period.

 

[mipi]

Thanks. Yes, I have read that no drivers are or will be available.
Why do you say on 4K editing I have to use RAID configuration on HDDs;

 

[popatim]

because normal HDD's are two slow and you nearly double there speed by placing 2 of them in a raid 0 array. Don't get me wrong , you can use non-raid HDD's as long as you understand they will slow you down. For a home user with plenty of time feel free.

You also need to be aware that no form of raid is a backup, esp raid 0 where you don't even have redundancy*, so an external data backup is recommended. Backup the whole system if you like I have tons of room on my server so I backup both in several different places. (I *really* don't want to LoL my stuff LoL)

* If one drive corrupts or fails you lose all data. Since data is split between both drives you have no way to recover anything from the remaining drive.

 

[mipi]

Thank you very much for explanation. I need to read and understand a lot about RAID configurations.

On a new RAID configuration, 2 existing same size HDDs have to be empty or can I use HDDs with, say, different data already stored inside them, I mean all data have to be deleted when you make somekind of a RAID on existing drives;

 

[popatim]

The involved Drives get wiped when creating a raid array so yes you have to have the data stored somewhere else then copied back into the aray when its finished formatting. its not like you wont need the data stored on another drive anyways as a backup.

 

[mipi]

Thank you. I really appreciate all replies!