Remove sas controller and raid configuration from t7500

[cdmon]

I just bought an Dell Precision t7500 from ebay. It has a Dell PERC 6/i sas controller card with a single 2TB drive running on raid with it's own drive letter and 3-15K sas HDD's connected all on one drive letter. It also has a SSD boot drive running directly off of a sata port and not connect to the raid config. I want to completely remove the controller and the 3-15K drives and run the 2tb and a few other 2-4tb drives (not yet in the system) on the sata ports with their own individual drive letters. Need some insight on how to do this as I was told that if I remove these I would lose my OS. I want to set this computer up for audio and video editing as a dual boot hackintosh/win 10 pro machine. I have no need for the raid configuration. It is just taking up precious space and resources in my computer.

 

[Gr3iz]

Hello and welcome to TSG!!

RAID, by definition, encompasses multiple drives. Not sure how you have " a single 2TB drive running on raid ". You could also break the RAID on the SAS controller and use those drives as individual drives. I've got a SAS controller in my desktop with two 1TB drives connected, along with a couple of SATA drives, each separate drives with their own drive letters. 15K drives are going to be speedy!

 

[zx10guy]

As an FYI, I had to set up a RAID volume that consisted of one drive and did multiples of this. The reason I had to do this was due to the need to have individual drives available for a hyperconverged platform I was building. I had a RAID controller but not a SAS HBA. So what I did was create a bunch of RAID 0 volumes which only had one drive in them. I then presented this up to the hyperconverged software which saw them as individual drives. Nutanix is one example of a hyperconverged platform which needed this.

But as to the OP, I'm also confused as to which volume/drive is running the OS and what drives are part of what RAID volume (RAID type will also be necessary information).

 

[Macboatmaster]

I want to set this computer up for audio and video editing as a dual boot hackintosh/win 10 pro machine.

If you really do mean HACKINTOSH, then we will not help with that as mentioned below

To install a MAC OS on that computer, requires the MAC system to be hacked to enable it to be done.

Apple states
Installing macOS on a Windows computer violates the Apple End User License Agreement.
That is so even if you have purchased a MAC OS as the software - the OS is licensed to you for use in accordance with the conditions of that licence and is not owned by you.

I do appreciate that you have not actually asked for help in the dual install, but I thought it appropriate to let you know of the situation.
One of the rules of this site is

Please don't ask for advice on using illegal software.

which the MAC OS would be as its use would as said contravene End User agreements.

 

[cdmon]

Hello and welcome to TSG!!

RAID, by definition, encompasses multiple drives. Not sure how you have " a single 2TB drive running on raid ". You could also break the RAID on the SAS controller and use those drives as individual drives. I've got a SAS controller in my desktop with two 1TB drives connected, along with a couple of SATA drives, each separate drives with their own drive letters. 15K drives are going to be speedy!

My computer has a Dell PERC 6/i adapter card. The first raid instance has the 3-15K rpm drives, but each are only 300GB. These are showing up in the system as one 836GB drive on letter G [disk#0]. It shows the second instance, the 2TB also running through the same controller as 1862GB running on a separate drive letter E [disk#1], so I imagine that it is running separate raid from the 3-15K drives. Unfortunately, the 15K drives do not offer enough storage for my needs. My C: drive [disk#2 boot drive] is a 128GB SSD, running directly off the mother board sata ports. It has partition 0 as 548 MB and partition 1 as 111GB. I need advice on how to remove the raid controller card, and whatever bios changes that I may need to make to facilitate that. I am planning on installing a pcie to sata 3 card in place of the PERC 6/i controller card as it only allows for 3Gbps. But I don't need raid.

 

[cdmon]

If you really do mean HACKINTOSH, then we will not help with that as mentioned below

To install a MAC OS on that computer, requires the MAC system to be hacked to enable it to be done.

Apple states
Installing macOS on a Windows computer violates the Apple End User License Agreement.
That is so even if you have purchased a MAC OS as the software - the OS is licensed to you for use in accordance with the conditions of that licence and is not owned by you.

I do appreciate that you have not actually asked for help in the dual install, but I thought it appropriate to let you know of the situation.
One of the rules of this site is

which the MAC OS would be as its use would as said contravene End User agreements.

I wasn't asking for help with Hackintosh, I was asking for help with removing the the raid controller from my computer.

 

[Gr3iz]

I didn't realize the drives were that small. Is the 2TB also a SAS drive?

Is there anything on the system now that prevents you from re-installing Win10? If not, you should be able to remove the card and SAS drives, then reinstall Win10 using the MCT on a flash drive, if it doesn't boot. If you've got special software installed that cannot be easily reinstalled, or some other reason why doing a clean install might not be feasible, we can take it from there.

Since the RAID is done using hardware, there is likely nothing in BIOS that should be affected.

 

[cdmon]

As an FYI, I had to set up a RAID volume that consisted of one drive and did multiples of this. The reason I had to do this was due to the need to have individual drives available for a hyperconverged platform I was building. I had a RAID controller but not a SAS HBA. So what I did was create a bunch of RAID 0 volumes which only had one drive in them. I then presented this up to the hyperconverged software which saw them as individual drives. Nutanix is one example of a hyperconverged platform which needed this.

But as to the OP, I'm also confused as to which volume/drive is running the OS and what drives are part of what RAID volume (RAID type will also be necessary information).

As an FYI, I had to set up a RAID volume that consisted of one drive and did multiples of this. The reason I had to do this was due to the need to have individual drives available for a hyperconverged platform I was building. I had a RAID controller but not a SAS HBA. So what I did was create a bunch of RAID 0 volumes which only had one drive in them. I then presented this up to the hyperconverged software which saw them as individual drives. Nutanix is one example of a hyperconverged platform which needed this.

But as to the OP, I'm also confused as to which volume/drive is running the OS and what drives are part of what RAID volume (RAID type will also be necessary information).

Not sure which raid level is used, my guess would be the 2TB drive would be on raid 0 and the 15K would be on raid 5 but not completely sure. I have no experience with raid. Just a guess

 

[cdmon]

I didn't realize the drives were that small. Is the 2TB also a SAS drive?

Is there anything on the system now that prevents you from re-installing Win10? If not, you should be able to remove the card and SAS drives, then reinstall Win10 using the MCT on a flash drive, if it doesn't boot. If you've got special software installed that cannot be easily reinstalled, or some other reason why doing a clean install might not be feasible, we can take it from there.

Since the RAID is done using hardware, there is likely nothing in BIOS that should be affected.

my question here is that if my OS is on a SSD boot drive NOT connected to the raid controller would I still need to reinstall win 10 on it?? the 2TB is not an sas drive. There isn't much on this computer. Nothing at all on the sas drives. A few things on the 2TB but nothing I couldn't easily replace.

 

[Gr3iz]

You should not have to unless there is something that was installed on another drive. Not likely, but possible. I was just saying that Win10 could easily be reinstalled, if necessary.

 

[cdmon]

You should not have to unless there is something that was installed on another drive. Not likely, but possible. I was just saying that Win10 could easily be reinstalled, if necessary.

So I should be able to remove the raid controller, add a pcie to sata adapter card in it's place and run all my drive independently on sata? I shouldn't have to reinstall windows, because my boot drive is hooked directly to the motherboard and not to the raid controller? Not that reinstalling windows would be that much of a problem except for probably finding drivers for it. This machine is about 10 years old. But it is a beast. It has 2x Xeon X5680 3.33GHz hex core processors with hyper threading (12 cores and 24 threads) and 96gb of ram. This should run my DAW and my video editing software quite nicely.

 

[Macboatmaster]

cdmon

I wasn't asking for help with Hackintosh, I was asking for help with removing the the raid controller from my computer.

I appreciate you were not actually asking for help with Hackintosh
as I said on my reply

I do appreciate that you have not actually asked for help in the dual install, but I thought it appropriate to let you know of the situation.

 

[zx10guy]

Since your OS is on a drive not being managed by the PERC6 controller, removal of the PERC6 will not affect that drive or the OS install. While I'm sure you can just pull the PERC6 controller and recycle the drives, It's best to go into the BIOS of the PERC6 to delete the RAID volumes which should clean up the drives. I don't remember if you can do an initialization on the drives outside of having the drives be part of a RAID volume.

With the drives, you need to verify if they're SATA or SAS. There is a huge difference. SAS controllers will work with SAS drives and SATA drives. SATA controllers will NOT work with SAS drives. To tell the difference, either look on the drive label to see if it tells you the type of drive it is. I'm certain the information will be there. The other way is to look at the connector on the drive. If there is a bridge between the data and power connectors, then it's a SAS drive. I'm pretty certain the 300GB drives you have are SAS. With the 2TB drive, it can either be a NLSAS or SATA drive. Don't recall ever seeing a SAS drive in that capacity as a 3.5" drive. NLSAS stands for near line SAS. What this means is the drive is at its core a SATA drive. But the data communications between the drive and the controller is over SAS. So it's a hybrid drive. Been told there are some performance advantages with NLSAS over just straight SATA.

 

[cdmon]

cdmon




I appreciate you were not actually asking for help with Hackintosh
as I said on my reply

I think it a bit presumptive to have mentioned it at all, unless I actually asked with help that particular subject, But no worries, I've got that covered.

 

[cdmon]

Since your OS is on a drive not being managed by the PERC6 controller, removal of the PERC6 will not affect that drive or the OS install. While I'm sure you can just pull the PERC6 controller and recycle the drives, It's best to go into the BIOS of the PERC6 to delete the RAID volumes which should clean up the drives. I don't remember if you can do an initialization on the drives outside of having the drives be part of a RAID volume.

With the drives, you need to verify if they're SATA or SAS. There is a huge difference. SAS controllers will work with SAS drives and SATA drives. SATA controllers will NOT work with SAS drives. To tell the difference, either look on the drive label to see if it tells you the type of drive it is. I'm certain the information will be there. The other way is to look at the connector on the drive. If there is a bridge between the data and power connectors, then it's a SAS drive. I'm pretty certain the 300GB drives you have are SAS. With the 2TB drive, it can either be a NLSAS or SATA drive. Don't recall ever seeing a SAS drive in that capacity as a 3.5" drive. NLSAS stands for near line SAS. What this means is the drive is at its core a SATA drive. But the data communications between the drive and the controller is over SAS. So it's a hybrid drive. Been told there are some performance advantages with NLSAS over just straight SATA.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I was aware that you can use sata drives on sas but not the other way around. The 2tb is sata and the 15k drives are sas. I have no use for the 15K sas drives. And the boot drive is sata also. Ordering a pci-e 2.0 to sata 3.0 controller online to put in place of the PERC 6/i. Also going to add a pci-e 2.0 to usb 3.0 adapter to make this 10 year old beast more up to modern standards.