Hey Rick No problem at all, let me explain from the images you sent what you have in your system. You have an 8 x 2.5-inch SAS/SATA (HDD/SSD) backplane, it’s what we refer to as a universal backplane, it can take either SAS/SATA mechanical drives or SAS/SATA SSD drives. You should have 6 slots that are currently populated with what we call blanking plates. The blanking plates are needed when physical disks aren’t in the slots for airflow reasons. They should resemble something similar to the image below. You currently have 6 of these in the system. If you take one out and peer into the gap, you will see a connector which is on the physical backplane that a drive plugs into.   [IMAGE]   The connector itself is designed to accept both SATA / SAS drives. The connectors on the physical drives you purchase from Dell will seamlessly plug into the backplane and get detected by the PERC controller which is connected to the backplane via cables.   If you log onto your iDRAC 9 and click on the storage tab you will see something like the image below (depends on the iDRAC license and firmware).   Click on enclosure.   [IMAGE] On the enclosure tab, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and it will list the available free slots, in this example the system has x8 backplane with 4 disks populated and 4 free slots. The disks highlighted in green are drives that are in a “ready” state, this means the disks are not currently part of a raid set/virtual disk.   When you populate your new disks into the backplane they will appear automatically (no need to reboot) as the backplane and drives are what we refer to as hot pluggable, and the new drives will appear in a ready state.   [IMAGE]   From the iDRAC GUI you can then configure the new drives into a raid set without rebooting the system by clicking on the “create virtual disk” tab. [IMAGE]   A setup wizard will pop up – give the Virtual disk a name, select the raid layout and click next [IMAGE]   Select the new disks and click next [IMAGE]   Click next on the virtual disk settings [IMAGE]   On the confirmation tab click next. It will then prompt you on the next screen to “apply now”. The process of creating the Virtual disk will start. After a few minutes you should see the new Virtual disk in the iDRAC storage tab, you will also see it in your operating system. Again, the system/operating system will not need to be rebooted [IMAGE]   Just one other reminder. Make sure when you’re speaking to sales, to tell them you need 2.5inch drives. The R350 had a flexible option in terms of backplanes, you could buy them with a 3.5inch x 4 slot backplane or you could buy it with the 8x2.5inch backplane which you have. Once there 2.5inch drives, it doesn’t matter what you choose, you can purchase SAS 10k/15k or 7.2k SATA mechanical drives, or SSD SAS/SATA. The backplane will accept any of the disks I’ve listed. Let me know if you need anything else   Regards emmet    
Hi all.. I'm new here .. We've got a 1 year old PowerEdge R350 and initially spec'd it with a pair of 1.92Tb SSD Sata drives (this model here).  We'd like to increase our storage pool from 1.92Tb to about 6-8Tb without breaking the bank so to speak.   The server has 6 empty hot-swap 2.5" slots available (of the 8).  I don't know if there are any non-SSD drives that would work or just get more of the same drive to add..?  If there are non-SSD drives available, is it a bad idea to mix SSD w/ non-SSD drives -- with or within the same virtual drive? I just want to make sure I don't buy something I'll later regret.  ps. Our system has a PERC H755 controller if that matters.. Thanks much!
Suggestions for adding drives to existing RAID-1 drive pool..?