Compatibility of non-original HDDs with Dell Poweredge R750 servers

I work a lot with Dell server hardware. There are times when you need to choose hardware that is not from Dell. When the buyer sets requirements for server components based on software, budget and performance.

Over the years I've run into some weirdness with the Dell Poweredge family of servers when using non-genuine hard drives. This article will tell you which disks work without problems and vice versa.

My tests were done with a Dell Poweredge R750 server. I'm willing to bet this problem will happen again on other servers. Maybe your server is a different version, if you find any data to add, send me an email and I will update the article.

Server symptoms
On Dell Poweredge servers of various generations that I've tested, these may apply to others) with the built-in Perc H755 RAID controller, some hard drives will cause the system to behave strangely. At the same time, original Dell server disks work without problems. If you plug in a non-Dell drive, such as a SATA drive from your PC, it will most likely work just fine for the most part - the system will recognize, read, format, write, ... and you might think the server is fine. But if you're sitting next to the server in a quiet room, some drives will produce the following:

All fans will work almost at the limit, "buzzing like a jet engine".
The system will think that the HDDs are overheating.
The server can shut down and reboot to protect itself from high disk temperatures.

The disks show that they have overheated, from third-party manufacturers, which, judging by the readings, overheat. If you remove the disk, you can feel the warm surface to the touch, but even so it is clear that the claimed 61C is not true. In fact, the readings of the temperature sensors are erroneous.

Dell has a lot of documentation on the temperature sensors in the different R750 server variants. None of the documents show the physical location of sensor 29 on the motherboard. Hypothetically, I believe that the value shown on the 29th sensor is nothing more than the maximum value reported by the drives themselves via SMART or some other parameter. If such a situation arises that the disk does not report the temperature parameter, the Dell server operates according to the GIGO principle (GarbageIn, GarbageOut, "Garbage in - garbage out").

It looks like the Dell server is reading the temperature setting and making the fans spin abnormally fast in an attempt to cool the system. Theoretically, of course, it is possible to rewrite the firmware of the server and fix the situation, but Dell will not fix this problem for servers that have already been removed from support or are very close to it.

That way we can do our best to document exactly which drives are causing problems and which are working fine.

For lack of a better term, I'm going to call these symptoms "Thermal Runaway", even though the temperature can be absolutely fine.

Drives causing "Thermal Runaway" problem:

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