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Having made quite a market research (price, location, availability, specs) i ended up choosing Lenovo System x3100 M5 combined with two Samsung 850 PRO Series 1TB to be set on a raid 1. Now before i complete my order i was called back by my distributor and i was informed the the SSDs are incompatible. And so i did check with IBM's internal Drive Options and to my "surpize" it only states the ibm SSDs.

Now, we can understand why these drives would be suggested, but there is a huge difference between that and incompatibility. Has anyone tried and worked with this specific harware, or alike that would suggest i'd move forward with this setup.

Hanging over the phone to place the order, i thank you in advanve for your input.

IT

Ioannis
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Server vendors are really protective of their lucrative certified disk market. While it is true that additional validation should be performed, they often exaggerate the whole thing, banning any non certified disk.

Two examples to show how they had gone too far ahead playing this (depressing) game:

  1. based on your vendor, enterprise-class drive as Intel S3700 DC are not supported (they aren't IBM drivers, of course)
  2. some time ago, DELL's PERC controller (rebranded LSI gear), refused to initialize any non-DELL disk, "because your data matter and we can not trust non-certified disks". This is a thought statement when DELL branded NL-SAS disks were rebranded WD RE disks. After many users complains, they remove this stupid check, letting users buy the disks they want.

If your vendor confim that non-IBM disks are not accepted by the RAID controller, you are screwed - you had to buy IBM disks.

If, on the other hand, they merely suggest to use IBM disks, than the Samsung 850 PRO disks should be a good choice - but be sure to read these serverfault threads here and here

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shodanshok
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  • Thank you for your insight. The vendor did came back to me with the following quotation: _"...up to eight internal 2.5-inch hot-swap SAS/SATA HDDs..." "... we cannot guarantee successful installation and good functionality if it’s not a Lenovo disk..."_ I think this does leave quite a big margin for successful trial. Now regarding the extra links, I guess you wanted me to take an informative look on the differences between HW and SW RAID, which on my case it claims it uses the former (HW). Am i missing something else that I'm about to regret while implementing this setup !? – Ioannis Dec 22 '15 at 08:21
  • The important part was that, in order to extract good performance from the SSDs, you need to keep enabled the disk's private DRAM cache. As this can, depending on the specific controller/disks combo, sometime lead to data loss in case of power failure, you should carefully test your system to be sure it is working properly. – shodanshok Dec 22 '15 at 09:30