Hello osirisguy There is not a supported method for performing what you want. The PERC controllers supported in the 2950 do not support drives larger than 2TB. A drive larger than 2TB installed on a PERC 5/6 will either only display as a 2TB HDD or it may not be detected at all. Functionality will be trial and error for unsupported configurations.   No. The only way it will is with an H700 or newer PERC. There are community members that have successfully installed these controllers in older systems, but it is not a validated/supported configuration.   A 3 drive RAID 1 is not possible, but I understand what you are asking. Yes, the OS only sees the available space. Drives used for parity or mirroring are not presented to the OS. As far as the OS is concerned those drives do not exist.   The OS does not handle the RAID, but it does need to be able to properly communicate with the RAID controller. It communicates via the driver within the OS. I would suggest finding out if the driver is compatible with your OS. If your OS is similar to a supported OS like RHEL then it will likely work.   Dell drives are not required on our servers. You may encounter communication issues with non-Dell drives, but we do not force the use of our drives. Thanks
Hello, I would like to know if the PE2950 will recognize HDD capacities larger than 2TB. We are looking at setting up a server which will require a lot of storage, hence the need for the larger 3 or 4TB HDD. We will be using RAID10 along with FreeNAS OS. We will be populating the server with either (6) 3.5" 3TB HDD (usable capacity ~8.2TB) or (4) 3.5" 4TB HDD (usable capacity ~7.3TB). I am new to servers, but from what I currently understand is that the server will limit the recognized space before the OS will. I've seen that the PERC controllers limit at 12TB, would this be before or after RAID configuration? For example, will (6) 3TB only be recognized as 12TB for RAID0, but ~9TB for RAID1? Also, then if the server has PERC5 or PERC6, will it recognize the 18TB or the 16TB? Additionally, I believe the OS will also be handling the RAID, so I do not know if the software and RAID controller will have any conflicts. I read that the HDD will require Dell firmware. If we use third party drives (e.g., Seagate or WD; not Dell), can this still be done? (From my understanding, the server will recognize third party HDD, but using the PERC will not recognize them?) (Information source: [URL] I appreciate any and all help. Thanks.
>2TB HDD Compatibility with PE2950