what is the largest SATA drive that can be installed in Dell PowerEdge 2950

[BigDaddy77]

I have 2 dell PowerEdge 2950's. I installed a 1 Tb SATA drive in the first one and successfully installed the OS. (Win Server 2008 standard). No problems. I have 8 SAS drives (147 Gb each) and attempted several times to configure them as RAID 10 with no success. The configuration looks to be successful. I initialized the array and also did a consistency check. Took several hours, but completed successfully. BIOS recognizes the RAID array, but Windows doesn't.

On the second server, I installed a 2 Tb SATA drive and the system won't recognize it. Is 1 Tb the maximum SATA size?

 

[pauls3743]

When you deal with RAID controllers you normally, but not always, have to install specific drivers for your RAID controller as part of the Windows installation. It sounds like your first system is not using the RAID controller as the primary drive controller, so it's working fine.

For your second system you are using RAID controller as the primary hard drive controller. I would suggest you browse to the Dell website, download the RAID controller drivers to a USB stick and load them when your Windows installation get the drive selection screen.