How to update X25-E SSD firmware in PowerEdge 2900 with PERC 5/i

The traditional answer would be to separate the pagefile from the System drive but the X-25E's performance should generally make that unnecessary, especially on a server. If you can't put enough RAM in the system to avoid unnecessary paging, or you have applications (like Exchange 2007) that can make quite a lot of use of paging no matter what, then putting the page file on dedicated disks or on disks where the utilization is generally low remains a good idea.

However using a single X-25E for the system drive seems a bit strange to me. Whether it is a good idea or not to use SSD's for the system drive depends entirely on what you are using the server for but in most cases system drives on (properly configured) servers are not going to be the most significant IO bottleneck you want to control.

What I can say for certain though is that you should not use just one drive for system or normal data volumes. The standard practice of using two relatively small but reasonably fast drives (2x10K SAS) in RAID 1 provides sufficient performance to load the (mostly static) system drive files for most servers but guarantees you some level of failure resilience. SSD's might not be mechanical but they can, and do, still fail.

Ideally you want to use SSD's to eliminate something that is IOPS limited - your RAID 10 arrays are probably able to get close enough to matching the X-25E's transfer rate under most conditions but they wont come close to the IOPS (a couple of hundred at best versus many thousands for the X-25E). However since it's a single drive you should be very reluctant to put anything that you can't afford to lose completely on it - if it was me I'd be using it for temp file space (print spooling for example, scratch DB area for reporting etc).

The H200 can present at most 2 logical drives (virtual disks) so your plan for 3 RAID groups wont fly with the H200 controller alone. You could configure the SSD's in one RAID 10 group, and the 8 SAS HDD's in the other but that wont deliver isolation between the IO on the two data drives.

Which document are you referring to that states that the SAS drives must be in slots 0 and 1 for mixed SAS\SSD setups? The H200 user guide doesn't mention that restriction, the only restrictions that are mentioned are that all drives in a RAID group must be either all SSDs or HDDs and either all SAS or all SATA.