Technical rules for drives
Use this section to understand the technical rules for drives.
Drive installation rules
The following rules for drives provide information necessary for installing a drive.
The drive bays are numbered to indicate the installation order (starting from number “0”). Follow the installation order when you install a drive. See Front view.
The drives in a single RAID array must be of the same type (as in hard disk drives (HDD), solid-state drives (SSD), and so on), same size, and same capacity.
You can use drives from different vendors.
You can mix drives of different types and different capacities in one system, but not in one RAID array.
For EDSFF drives, follow the numerical order of the drive bay sequence. Do not skip bays when installing EDSFF drives.
EDSFF, U.2 and U.3 drives are all NVMe drives, but mixing EDSFF drives with U.2 or U.3 drives in one RAID array is not supported.
Special notes
Onboard connections only support SATA HDDs/SSDs but do not support SAS HDDs.
Tri-mode RAID cards support U.3 NVMe SSDs but do not support U.2 NVMe SSDs.
When 7mm drives are installed, two PCIe adapters can be installed on the rear at most.
When rear 2x2.5 SSDs are installed, only one PCIe adapter can be installed on the rear.
When a Gen 3 M.2 SATA 2-Bay Enablement Kit is installed, at least one M.2 disk needs to be installed.
- VMware ESXi does not support the following SSDs:
ThinkSystem 2.5" U.3 6500 ION 30.72TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD
ThinkSystem 2.5" U.2 P5336 7.68TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD
ThinkSystem 2.5" U.2 P5336 15.36TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD
ThinkSystem 2.5" U.2 P5336 30.72TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD
ThinkSystem 2.5" U.2 P5336 61.44TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD