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Review on πŸ”’ Dell PERC H700 RAID Controller with 512MB Memory by Louis Asok

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Inexpensive upgrade Dell R710 PERC 6/i

I read that PERC 6/i is limited to 3GB and H700 to 6GB in my Dell R710. I didn't see a doubling of IOPS, but I did see a 25% speed increase when backing up with rsnapshot. You need to replace the cables from the SAS backplane to the H700. It took over 15 minutes to shut down the server and all my VMs to swap out the RAID card and cables. All the talk on Reddit says I need to import my old RAID config as a foreign config. But when I booted up, the H700 said all my virtual drives were there and continued to boot. No effort was required on my part other than watching the boot process. After launching Ubuntu, the Dell IDRAC software complained that my H700 firmware needed to be updated. A quick visit to the Dell website brought me a Linux .bin file. I gave up my 6 VMs and other applications and ran the .bin file as root. After 10 minutes the firmware was updated. I started the virtual machines and manually took a backup with rsnapshot. My backup time for 900GB went from 5 hours to around 3 hours. This was the cheapest way to improve the R710's I/O performance.

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Cons
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