Hello,   OpenManage has an Ubuntu release, so you could consider using that to view your current firmware revisions. The iDRAC should also give you some visibility to firmware, as well.   You can pull updates from [URL] You'll just need to provide the site your service tag and it will pull the available updates.    Regarding SSDs (and unvalidated storage in general), I can say that I ran unvalidated storage in my server and never encountered an issue. However, I've also spoken to a few folks that had to switch drive models. One other issue you may run into installing drives to the board is that the onboard PERC (separate from the PCI PERC) likely won't work in your OS. You'll almost certainly want to make sure SATA operation is set to AHCI, not RAID On. For a single drive, that's not really an issue, though.    Let me know if this helps.
I recently got a refurbed R710 server.  After Installing UBUNTU 20.04 and running GeekBench I got this: Processor Information   Memory Information   I compared that to on old iMac that I have, and it actually compares relatively favorably. Main question is how to install an SSD.  It has a built-in RAID contoller (CTRL-R) to access it, and it looks like there are also 2 SATA ports, 1 of which is unused.  I'd like to be able to install a 1TB SSD for the system, and just use the RAID for DATA and maybe for a backup of the system.  Just wondering about the best way to do that.  SSD's can be had on Amazon for not much, but I would need an adapter to mount it in one of the 6 bays where the HDD's are, or another mounting bracket if it can be mounted somewhere it addition to the 6 bays. I have to say, it was a bit of trouble getting UBUNTU to install, and the whole system takes a long time to boot up after all of the preliminaries and checks.  I used F2 in the BIOS to boot into a USB installation, and walked through the install a few times because I had to enable booting using UEFI.  Not really how best to set that up when using the RAID.  I would prefer to have multiple virtual disks (1 for system, 1 for system backup, 2 for data and 2 for data backup).  Finally got it to work, but wondering if there is a recommended setup, even though UBUNTU is apparently not a supported OS. The memory size also says 125.89 with GeekBench.  Not sure why that is. I would imagine (hope) that getting an SSD will improve performance quite a bit, and if so, might even be worthwhile to just populate the RAID with a couple of SSD's to completely replace the HDD. Regarding any upgrades, maintenance, how would I go about checking the firmware and upgrading it if necessary ?  I have not been able to access any of the other system setup or IDRAC tools yet.   Thanks.
Fixer-Upper R710, SSD config, etc.