Dell R720 (12th Gen *20 servers)

The USB port is great for hosting a bare metal OS, but if you want to store and VMs, or OS data, your options are not the greatest. Unlike the R710 which allowed me to run a PCIe SATA card for my SSDs, the R720 has an issue with bifurcation and its UEFI environment, and does not allow for drives to run off of non SAS cards.

Next to the SATA data connectors is J_BP0, and J_TBU, which are the power connectors for a tape backup and the optical disk drive. You'll want to steal power from there. The onboard SATA data connectors are SATA II speed (3Gb/s), and the PCIe slots are x8. Either way, PCIe will alleviate the bottleneck of SATA III.

• G8XTP is the tape cable, which will easily take a SATA power splitter, and power multiple SSDs.
• F6HJD is the Slim DVD connector, which is proprietary SATA. There are DVD drive caddies that you can install instead of the DVD drive that will house a 2.5“ drive in that bay.

https://dan.langille.org/2019/10/11/installing-internal-pci-slot-ssd-drive-enclosures-in-a-dell-r720/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/r720-connector-documentation-wrong.26070/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/ovmfgg/dell_r720xd_embedded_sata_ports/

If you buy an R720 that the iDRAC is “bricked”, either by someone trying to do an upgrade from a really old version to the latest, or just the EMMC failing on update, you might have a way to recover. You'll need to solder a header pin set on the iDRAC UART ports on the board, and go direct console via UART. From there you can either force a reset of iDRAC if you are able to, or try go into developer mode to reload the firmware via SD or TFTP. My experiences left me with the option of replacing the motherboard or trying to replace the emmc chip. There is a way to boot iDRAC from SD.

Mid-cycle, Dell switched the file structure layout for iDRAC, and combined the Lifecycle Controller and iDRAC firmwares together. If a user tried to to an update from a v1 to v2, there would tend to be issues as the emmc would be full and parts of the partition would be lost.

Specifically, if the iDRAC version is 1*, a user has to update to the latest v1 iDRAC, then update to the first 2* version, then can update as you please to the latest version to help avoid bricking the emmc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/a49b4y/r720_idrac_help/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvSDNAi39YY https://www.win-raid.com/t3828f16-Problem-Dell-R-xd-iDRAC-BIOS-Recovery-6.html#msg80465 https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/bsou3n/dell_r520_idrac_7_swc0700_and_idrac8_prompt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/phll8h/boot_dell_r720_idrac_from_sd_card/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/cd5jhu/new_r620_made_me_bring_out_the_soldering_iron/