Much of what you might ever want to know about the H700 can be found here: [URL] There are far too many possible drive and array combinations to allow all of them to be configured on the website.  If you need a configuration that is not allowed on the web configurator, call your sales rep (you'll usually get a better price than the web price too).  The H700 supports RAID 0,1,5,50,10,50,60, up to 64 virtual disks (RAID arrays), with any combination of arrays and drives sizes/types (SAS, NLSAS, and SATA - just not mixed in the same array).  It also supports more than 16 drive total, but no more than 8 spans (16 drives) per nested/large virtual disk (RAID 10,50,60 ... RAID 10 for example might be 4 drives with 2 spans - RAID 1 + 0).
Hoping someone can help me out with this, I'm sure that this is a really basic question but I want to make sure that my understanding of this is solid. I'm looking to purchase a new Dell PowerEdge R910 whose primary application will be MS SQL Server. My question has to do with RAID configuration on the internal H700 SAS interface. What I'd like to do is one RAID 1 virtual drive that contains the OS and one RAID 10 virtual drive that contains the SQL files.  At this time I don't really have a need for any SSDs.  I would like for the RAID 10 to be striped across 3 pairs of mirrored drives. I would also like to reserve the option of adding additional virtual disks in the future. So that in a year or two I can easily add another RAID 10 virtual disk. So my question really is a couple of questions: 1. The H700 supports up to 16 drives but I can't find anything recommending what combinations of drives and numbers of RAID arrays of what types are supported? 2. Is there any point to worrying about what drives are attached to what connector? If I buy all drives in pairs will it suffice to pair them across the 2 H700 connectors and just let the RAID setup figure it out? 3. The Dell purchasing page allows you to select preconfigured RAID configurations, it will complain if your selection of drives doesn't match the selected RAID. The only mention of multiple virtual disks is in reference to SSDs. What's going on here? How do I handle the case of multiple VDs on one H700 when configuring a server on the purchase page? Hoping that someone can set me straight on this. It's been awhile since I purchased a server and I seem to be behind on the tech. Thanks in advance for your help!
Purchasing R910, question about possible H700 RAID configurations.