Hello, looking for clarification on Dell Poweredge T110 II

General Introductions
1

Hello
Just starting to get into the home lab and wanting to learn.

I was looking at the suggestions on this site and saw the Dell Poweredge T110 II as a prebuilt. But after doing some searching I see posts on Dell saying it only supports up to 2 TB drives and one model of 3 TB hitachi drives. I was hoping to throw in 4x8 TB WD drives I shucked. Is there a way to make it work?

Or should I go with the build suggestions instead?

Thanks for the help

2

If it supports > 2TB drives, it will support any size drive on the market. It is likely due to the fact that drives larger than 3TB were not available to the market when the T110 II was released.

3

Cool, thanks for info I’ll give it a go

4

Hi, I’m looking at getting a T110 and wondered if you had any success with bigger drives?

5

Yes I managed to get 3x 10TB and 3x 8TB drives working as long you use kapton tape to cover the 3rd pin I also used a external esata port and ran a long esata to Sata cableSo I could get 6 drives running at once.
I converted the 2 5.25 bays to hold 3.5 inch drives

6

Great! Think I might take the plunge then! I don’t suppose you are using yours for Plex at all?

7

I have a T110 II with 3x 12 TB shucked WD Easystores in it. I had been using it for Plex via unRAID for a while, but have since offloaded that to a separate box with QuickSync capabilities as per guidance from this forum

8

I use it for Plex and works fine.

I did upgrade the cpu from a Xeon 3430 to a 3470 for $30 off eBay and the devices I stream to can handle x265 1080 without transcode

As a test I did try a compressed 4k stream to a 1080p device and it took the cpu the 90% otherwise it sits at 12% or lower

9

Thanks for the replies, appreciated.

10

How did you manage to get 12 TB disks to be recognized? I’ve been researching like crazy because I want to use this tower but it refuses to recognize disks bigger than 2TB.

11

Have you tried loading them in? Or basing this off research alone?

I set up my tower a long time ago but I don’t remember having any issues getting it to recognize the drives. All I did was shuck them and do the whole kapton tape 3rd pin thing which I believe is required with shucked drives regardless.

Coincidentally, I’m looking to upgrade my setup soon and will be offloading this tower including its CPU (Intel® Xeon® CPU E31270 @ 3.40GHz) and RAM (8 GiB DDR3 Multi-bit ECC). If you’re interested, I could try to move that process along and sell it to you.