5CT6D: Dell 5CT6D PERC H710 Mini Mono SAS Integrated RAID Controller

The Dell 5CT6D PERC H710 Mini Mono SAS Integrated RAID Controller is the 512 MB entry cached card of the PERC H310, H710, H710P and H810 family. The H710 comes as an adapter, a mini monolithic card and a mini blade. The mini monolithic card has a heatsink and a battery and is held by two release levers and two locating pins in a card holder on the system board.

The chip is a Dell SAS RAID-on-Chip with eight ports and the LSI 2008 chipset. Cache is 512 MB of DDR3 at 800 MHz, non-volatile and protected by a battery backup unit. RAID levels are 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60, and the controller complies with SAS 2.0 for up to 6 Gb/s throughput, supporting SAS and SATA hard drives and SSDs. SAS and SATA cannot be mixed within one virtual disk, and neither can hard drives and SSDs.

The H710 supports up to 64 virtual disks per controller, 16 virtual disks per disk group and 8 spans per disk group. A dirty cache LED on the card indicates whether cache data is being preserved after a power loss, and the battery runs a transparent learn cycle every 90 days that takes about seven hours. The H710 supports self-encrypting disks with one security key per controller, but it does not support FastPath.

Non-RAID drive configuration is available only on the H310, not the H710. Virtual disks created on a PERC H700 or H800 can be migrated to the H710, and volumes from an H310 can also be imported; migration back to the H310, H700 or H800 is not supported. Hot swapping requires a backplane that supports it and a replacement disk of the same protocol and technology and equal or greater capacity.