I have got the built-in iDRAC 6 Express working on our Dell R610's, but I am about to get some iDRAC 6 Enterprise cards, which can be gotten fairly cheaply on eBay (around 20 USD at the time of writing).
I see that these iDRAC enterprise cards have a capability to use a Dell vFlash SD card. The 8GB dell SD cards look like they are around 35 USD on eBay (I have no idea what a new card costs, and of course the ones on eBay could have had quite a lot of use). For comparison the first 8GB SD card on Amazon I looked at was around 8 USD.
So my question is: can a normal SD card be substituted for the vFlash SD card in the iDRAC? If so, are their any other substitute cards I should consider?
Best Answer
Yes, pretty much any SD card will be usable in your Dell R610. However, an important consideration is that if you use a normal SD card, your iDRAC will only be able to access a single, 256 MB partition on that card.
If you use a vFlash card, your iDRAC will be able to access up to 16 partitions on the SD card, with a maximum partition size of 4 GB.
If you do consider alternate cards, you really want to consider the card's data transfer rating ("Speed Class"). It is extremely infuriating to wait an hour to load your OS ISO because someone put a Speed Class 2 SD card in to save $10.