Dell MD1200 Help

Hardware Enterprise Gear
1

I got two questions about the Dell MD1200 Disk shelf.

  1. Is the only way to update the firmware on the shelf controller is to have the paired Dell HBA/RAID card? if so what dell cards work? i would have to purchase one.

  2. I want to run it in split mode and when i flip the switch only half of the disks show up. in unified mode i can be plugged in either shelf controller and i have swapped them around and it works just fine in unified mode just not split.
    i had a MD1000 and used it in split mode just fine by flipping the switch. same HBA card one both shelfs. is there some thing special about the MD1200?

4

I have one of these in the basement but it took me a while to fish it out to see what the deal with it was.

A perc 6 e or r200 should do what you want. The split mode is really meant for old school nt cluster mode where windows would cluster by having multiple servers on the same scsi bus, so it can be a bit misleading. You will probably need ancient server 2003 to update the firmware?

It can “fail” and enable all disks to be seen by one host too because that’s what that feature was originally meant for.

5

My plan was to run the MD1200 in split mode for my ZFS storage and run mirrors.
I would set it up to have the mirror sets split between the two sides. more for a redundancy than anything else. I don’t think it will add to the over all speeds

6

I found a tech manual for the MD1200. from what i have read if i leave it the was its setup right now it will multi-path the SAS drives.
so i am going to keep my current unified setup

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