Hello jtoering   It is going to be difficult to find someone who has performed this exact procedure, but I can answer your questions.   Importing from an S300 to an H700 is not supported and will not likely work. The two cards are made by different manufacturers and write metadata differently. If you can get it to work then great, but it is not supported and will not likely work. The H700 only supports migration from a PERC 6/i or H200. You can refer to section 4.8 on page 19 of this document for clarification: [URL]   No, the cable is not the same between an S300 and an H700 as you can plainly see. The H700 uses mini-SAS on both ends whereas the PERC6/i and S300 cable uses mini-SAS on just the backplane connection. Here are the cable part numbers: W846K PERC7 hotplugY690K PERC7 cable KNJKY PERC6 hotplugD385M PERC6 cable The hotplug cable is used if you have a backplane, and the cabled version is used if you are cabling the drives directly to the controller.   There is only one PCI holder for the T310. Thanks
My question is, has anybody here actually done this?  If so, how did you accomplish it?I plan to upgrade a T310 from S300 SAS with a 4 drive RAID-5 to an H700i.  The reason for the upgrade is because there are simply too many problems with restoring, expanding, and working with 3rd party partitioning software.  E.G. your a far less likely to be able to safely manage and restore a system using the S300 than the H700i.  Fortunately, we only sold two with S300s before we discovered we were not actually getting the PERC controller, so our intention is to replace the two S300s to H700i controllers.  It would be irresponsible not to.The purpose for the post is because I've been through many calls to Dell's technical support, and there is no consensus across at least 7 different occasions as to how this can be accomplished.  The only consistent comments involve apologizing for the software controllers.  The opinions range from you can't, to all you need to do is replace it, import the array, and Windows will see it as new hardware and install the driver.  He sounded very confident about how to go from an S to an H, so I ordered and received a new H700i with 1 gig cache from Dell parts, as parts recommended.  Then on the last call, the tech said I cannot do that, but need to do a backup and restore of the system, but it will work fine and it uses the same cables.  When I pulled the side cover on a T310 with an S300 controller, I found that the cabling for the S300 can't possibly connect to an H700i.  Now I don't know if I bought cables if the other ends would fit the back current back plane for the hot-swap SAS drives, or if that is different too.  Moreover, the S300 has a bracket that clips to the bottom of the chassis that pushes against the connector on the S300 connector to hold it in.  That bracket couldn't serve the same function on a 700i, and I don't know the the H700i has a different bracket available that I should also buy or not.At this point, I have an adequate supply of theories and opinions.  My question is, has anybody here actually done this?  If so, how did you accomplish it?Thanks!
Upgrading T310 from S300 to H700i