This post will be short and sweet. If you have an R740xd with a rear flex bay you need high performance fans installed otherwise fan speed will remain at 100%. I’ve seen this behavior time and time again.
Here’s a screenshot of the fans with standard cooling fans installed:
And here is a screenshot right after the installation of high performance fans:
It may be necessary to reset iDRAC after installation of high performance fans.
The 16 and 24 bay models of the DL 380 G10 require a SAS expander to supply the front drive bays with SAS lanes. The 8 bay model does not require such a setup. The backplane is simply connected directly to the RAID controller. It’s actually quite rare to not see the SAS expander built into server backplanes but that was the design choice by HP for this model.
You are first going to need the SAS expander itself which looks like the following:
On the card are 9 ports. It installs into Riser 1.
The cables you need will route from the backplane to the SAS expander, and then connect to your RAID controller. You will actually notice 3 separate backplanes on this server. Each section of backplane are known as bays.
You have Bay 1, Bay 2, and Bay 3.
The required cables will plug into Bay 1 ports 1/2, Bay 2 ports 1/2, and Bay 3 ports 1/2.
Here’s the first set of cables:
These plug into the first ports labeled Bay 1 Ports 1 and 2. They will route along the left side of the chassis On the expander you’ll plug these into ports 3 and 4. These are for the first 8 drive bays on the server. Note, ports 1 and 2 are reserved for the cables that go from the expander to the RAID controller. We will plug those in later.
The next 2 bays will use the same cable. We call this the octopus cable.
It has 4 Mini SAS connectors on both ends of the cable. One side plugs into the other 2 backplanes on the server. The other side plugs into the SAS expander on ports 5, 6, 7, and 8. The cable will be labeled so you know what goes where.
It’s easiest to have the SAS expander card out of the riser when you begin plugging in the cables.
Lastly, you have ports 1 and 2. These are individual cables that go from the SAS expander to your RAID controller. They can vary in length. There are shorter cables designed to just go from the expander to a PCIe controller in the same riser. There are also longer cables designed to reach further out to a controller installed in the Mezzanine.
Here you can see I’m using the short cables to go from the expander right to a PCIe controller. Both the expander and RAID controller are now installed in riser 1.
Once you’re cabled up turn it on and verify that your server can see the RAID controller and your drives. If it’s only seeing drives in some drive bays you may have a loose cable, the wrong cable, or a cable plugged into the wrong port.
On the DELL R740xd there are 3 variations of riser 1.
2 of these variations are incompatible with a mini controller because of their length, and the fact that they use up the slot on the motherboard required by the mini controller. To install the mini controller, an interposer must be installed first.
The interposer is essentially an interface between the controller and the motherboard.
There is only 1 riser compatible with the mini controller and unfortunately it only has 3 x8 PCIe slots. No x16.
The variations that do have x16 slots are too long and slot in to the same slot required by the interposer, as shown below:
So if you need a lot of x16 slots consider that you’ll need to use a PCIe RAID controller and not the mini.
The DELL Poweredge R640 does support NVME with a bit of extra cabling. More specifically, the 10 bay chassis. In this tutorial I’ll show you exactly what cables you need to setup 2, 4, 8, or a complete 10 bay NVME system.
The first thing to know is there are 3 DELL cables used to make this happen. The first cable we’ll discuss supplies the first 2 ports with NVME:
It’s essentially a slim SAS cable that connects to an NVME controller/expander card. The other cables we’ll discuss plug straight into the motherboard, but this one requires a separate card.
If you’re facing the server from the front, the connector is on the bottom left of the backplane. One end of the cable is labeled BP which is short for backplane. You’ll plug the BP side into the backplane.
There will be some other cables in your way. You don’t have to unplug them but it does help. The other end of the cable is labeled CTRL. The cable will route alongside the backplane and then up the entire length of the right side of the chassis.
Now that the cable is routed appropriately it’s time to install the NVME controller card.
Install the card into riser 1 and then attach the cable to the first port.
Now you’ve officially supplied the first 2 drive bays with NVME. The remaining 8 bays also require their own cabling setup. If all you needed was support for 2 NVME drives you can stop here. No further work is required, just plug in your drives and fire up the server.
Let’s install the other 2 sets of cables. Each of these cables supplies 4 bays with NVME support. The set of cables labeled A0 and B0 supply bays 6 – 9. The set of cables labeled A1 and B1 supply bays 2 – 5. The previous cable we just installed supplies bays 0 – 1.
Don’t feel bad if you struggle installing these, they’re an absolute pain unless you’ve cabled hundreds of them and have experience.
Here’s what the next cable looks like:
We will now move all the way to the right side of the backplane to the other Slim SAS connectors.
The cable labeled A0 and B0 will plug into their corresponding ports on the backplane (also labeled A0 and B0.)
These cables will route all the way to the left side of the chassis, up the cable channel, and then plug in to the Slim SAS connectors in the left rear of the motherboard.
Now onto the other set of cables (A1 and B1)
Do your best to tuck them under as best you can. Alongside the fans you’ll see hooks which keep the cables restrained and from popping out.
When it comes to routing them along the left side channel, I recommend pulling out the cables already installed. You don’t have to unplug them but it’s easier to route the NVME cables without them in the way. It’s much easier to tuck them in next to the NVME cables later.
Once you have them tucked in nicely you’ll see where they have to plug in to in the rear.
Find the ports labeled M1/M2/M3/M4 and just match them up.
And that’s all there is to it. If you’ve installed all 3 sets of cables you now have a server that supports 10 NVME drives. Keep in mind you don’t have to install all 3 sets. Once again, maybe you just want 4 bays with NVME connectivity. In that case, just install one set of the cables.
Thank you for reading.