Hi, Isn’t the supported/recommended configuration to use an HBA if you have to but never use a RAID controller? The backplane is already NVMe as the drives installed in the system currently are already NVMe. Also I was looking through some diagrams of the R750 and it appears that if you order them with the RAID controller(s) the bandwidth between the backplane and the system is hamstrung to some degree because of the cables they are using so even if I could configure them in NON raid it would still be suboptimal. Thanks for the information. -Drew From: John Jasen <jjasen@gmail.com> Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2024 10:06 AM To: Drew Weaver <drew.weaver@thenap.com> Cc: ceph-users@ceph.io Subject: Re: [ceph-users] Repurposing some Dell R750s for Ceph retrofitting the guts of a Dell PE R7xx server is not straightforward. You could be looking into replacing the motherboard, the backplane, and so forth. You can probably convert the H755N card to present the drives to the OS, so you can use them for Ceph. This may be AHCI mode, pass-through mode, non-RAID device, or some other magic words in the raid configuration utility. This should be in the raid documentation, somewhere. On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 9:17 AM Drew Weaver <drew.weaver@thenap.com<mailto:drew.weaver@thenap.com>> wrote: Hello, We would like to repurpose some Dell PowerEdge R750s for a Ceph cluster. Currently the servers have one H755N RAID controller for each 8 drives. (2 total) I have been asking their technical support what needs to happen in order for us to just rip out those raid controllers and cable the backplane directly to the motherboard/PCIe lanes and they haven't been super enthusiastic about helping me. I get it just buy another 50 servers, right? No big deal. I have the diagrams that show how each configuration should be connected, I think I just need the right cable(s), my question is has anyone done this work before and was it worth it? Also bonus if anyone has an R750 that has the drives directly connected to the backplane and can find the part number of the cable that connects the backplane to the motherboard I would greatly appreciate that part number. My sales guys are "having a hard time locating it". Thanks, -Drew _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io<mailto:ceph-users@ceph.io> To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io<mailto:ceph-users-leave@ceph.io>