Our PowerEdge T620 servers were configured as RAID 5 with S110 software controller by a former technician. The users always complained about their performance. The servers were installed Windows 2008 R2 and accounting system with SQL server database and web applications.
In order to resolve the performance problem, we decided to upgrade the RAID controller to use hardware controller card H710. The big challenge was to reinstall the application systems because they were not provided as a simple setup.exe.
After I did a lot of research from Internet, I found a solution and successfully upgraded the RAID controllers without reinstalling the OS and applications. In order to help other people who are struggling to do this kind of upgrading, I took the video of the upgrading procedure and published it on youtube as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYUMjUUw1Qk
Here is the instructions to do the upgrading for PowerEdge T620.
1. Shutdown the server and insert the H710 card to a PCI slot. Do not connect the H710 card to hard drives yet.
2. Power on the server and install H710 Windows driver program. Here is the link to download the driver http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER02416362M/1/SAS-RAID_Driver_D5N8T_WN64_6.802.21.00_A06.EXE. Download H710 disk driver from http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=M20VR and save them to a USB drive after unzip the files.
3. Restart the server after the driver program is installed.
4. Use Windows Server Backup program to backup the Windows drive (C:) as bare metal recovery to an external USB drive. Copy all other drives data to a different location on the external drive. Because upgrading the RAID controller will erase all data files on the hard drive of the RAID storage.
5. Shutdown the server and connect H710 to SATA drives' backplane using a cable 2T71R.
6. Power on the server and type F2 for system setup.
7. Change SATA disks' mode from RAID to AHCI mode. Then save the change and restart the server again.
8. When the server is booting, type CTRL-R to go to RAID controller configuration screen.
9. Set RAID controller's level as 5 and create virtual disks. If your system is initially configured as BIOS mode, don't create virtual disks with size larger than 2TB. Choose fast init for virtual disk's initialization. Save changes and reboot the server.
10. Type F11 to choose boot from DVD drive. Insert Windows 2008 R2 installation DVD and continue.
11. When Windows installation screen shows, select repair system. Wait for Windows finding your last bare metal recovery backup image. Then click next.
12. Load the H710 disk driver from the saved USB drive.
13. Start Windows restore process until Windows restarts again.
14. Format other drives and restore data files from the external drive.
Please refer to the youtube video for the real time recording.
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