Pull the boot drive and reboot to whatever OS you’re going to use on it. Just continue to hit until it drops all the way out to DOS.
Unfortunately explaining how to do that is a bit beyond the scope of this article. Press CTRL-R when prompted to by the BIOS to enter the H700 RAID controller configuration utility.
I was lucky enough to find a post by “tonyd88” on this Dell support forum which explains the process. Therefore by default write performance is downright painful.įortunately it’s not too difficult to fix if you can pull together the right tools. By default “write caching” is disabled – that unfortunately includes even “write caching” on the drives themselves (5i/R doesn’t have cache so it’s always “Write Through”, the H200 has cache, but is disabled by default). Well, that is, it’s good enough performance if you change the settings. The card isn’t amazingly high performance, but it it’s good enough for simple RAID. I had an old Dell PERC 5i/R RAID card laying around and wanted to use it for a home lab ESXi box (note: also works on Dell PERC H200).