# Dell R510 server to run Freebsd 7.3



## Doug (Aug 18, 2010)

Hello 

I am investigating purchasing a Dell R510 with the PERC 6i controller and additional battery backup module.

I can see that the mfi driver supports the PERC 6 controller but I am not sure if the 6i is supported.

Does anybody have experience with these servers running the PERC 6i controller?

If so could you please post any information you have on disk access speed running a RAID 0 config with 8 disks. Any suggestions you would have about attaining the highest disk access speed would be most helpful.

Thanks in advance.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Aug 18, 2010)

Doug said:
			
		

> I can see that the mfi driver supports the PERC 6 controller but I am not sure if the 6i is supported.


I'm not sure about the PERC series, but on Dell's SAS series controllers, the i or E just indicates whether the ports are internal or external (and an R after that indicates the SAS controller has the RAID-capable BIOS). That's a different driver (mpt) though.


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## Zhwazi (Aug 18, 2010)

I do tech support for these servers, but not for FreeBSD. The PERC 6i and 6E use the same driver, and there are no other PERC 6 models. As previously stated, the main difference is that the 6i is for *i*nternal drives and the 6E is for *e*xternal enclosures.

Can't really give good data on the performance of them in a RAID-0 because I never see people use them in a RAID-0 that wide and because I have no idea what kind of drives you plan to use.


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