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I have a Dell PowerVault MD1000 with all hard drives damaged.

I want to know if it is possible to replace the SAS drives with SATA drives + PN939 or similar interposer.

I know that SATA drives are not so performant but performance is not an issue. I only want to use this MD1000 for storage of some backups and it is not important to me if it takes 2, 3, 4 hours or more because I don't have that much data and the procedure happens at night. Also I am willing to replace the drives from time to time to avoid data loss.

I read on the Internet and opinions are divided: some say that you can only use certified drives others that you can use normal SATA drives. Some even say that they tried on their storage (different than mine) and worked fine.

Can anyone offer an opinion? Can I use normal drives or only certified drives? Where can I find a list of these certified drives for Dell PowerVault MD1000?

Thank you very much.

asciiphil
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2 Answers2

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The Dell only drive restriction on MD1000/MD3000 was removed after pressures from Customers (something like 3/4 years ago), as for the interposer the PN that you have should work without issues (both with MD1000 and MD3000).

Anyway don't take my answer as 100% accurate as the official documentation restricts support for Dell only drives, the best option in your case is to try them and see if they work.

Martino Dino
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Adding that interposer to any SATA disk should work, but supported/validated drives are less likely to have compatibility issues with your PERC controller on the server side.

If you are considering consumer-grade drives, I would strongly recommend RAID6 if you have a PERC6/E. You may also want to consider ordering only 2 drives to begin with so you can test them and verify they will at least work.

If you need a list of validated drives, I could email them to you. I would expect that they wouldn't be a great option for you considering the likely cost though.

JimNim
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