Poweredge R710 USB 3.0 pcie card boot drive

delldell-poweredgepci-expressusbwindows-server-2012-r2

Is it at all possible to boot the R710 from a pcie USB 3.0 card to have that as the boot up drive? And if thats possible which riser does it need to be installed in? Riser 1 or riser 2?
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Reason for me asking is because I want all 6 3.5" drives dedicated to storage RAID only and have the boot OS on something else other than the 6 drives.

I know the R710 comes with a dedicated USB socket but that's 2.0 so that's too slow for my liking.

I have the usb pcie board in the pcie slot and it seems to see it but windows can not see it as a drive?

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(source: spiceworks.com)

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(source: spiceworks.com)

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(source: spiceworks.com)

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(source: spiceworks.com)

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(source: spiceworks.com)

The above image shows "Removable Disk (C:)" which IS the USB 3.0 drive but it only shows up within looking for the "load drivers" part so that's not really helpful….But at least i know it sees it.

The USB 2.0 FD is the other usb stick I have in the motherboard usb 2.0 slot to install windows from.

So… what could I be doing incorrectly?

Best Answer

I understand your logic in going with a USB 3.0 PCIe card over the integrated USB 2.0 slot... But this is still a pretty bad idea. Unless you're installing "HyperV Server" (stripped down with the minimum features for a hypervisor only), it may even be near useless if you can actually get an OS install to work.

USB drives don't have device access times that you'd need to get anything resembling reasonable performance for an Enterprise production environment.

Perhaps try a consumer grade PCIe SSD?

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