IBM NeXtScale System Planning And Implementation Manual page 106

When the Storage Native Expansion Tray is used, one of the following disk
controller adapters must be installed in the PCIe slot in the nx360 M4:
ServeRAID M1115 SAS/SATA Controller for IBM System x, 81Y4448
N2115 SAS/SATA HBA for IBM System x, 46C8988
The storage tray connects to both ports on the M1115 controller. Each port
supports up to four hard drives and both ports are required to support the storage
tray.
When the storage tray is installed, the internal 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch disks of the
nx360 M4 cannot use the hardware RAID controller. However, they can use the
onboard ServeRAID C100 SATA controller to provide software RAID.
The following rules apply to 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch internal drives when
the storage tray is installed:
if two 2.5-inch SATA drives are installed, the onboard ServeRAID C100 SATA
controller is used for RAID with those two drives.
if two 2.5-inch SAS drives are installed, the onboard ServeRAID C100 SATA
controller cannot be used (the C100 does not support SAS drives) and only
operating system software RAID is possible
if four 1.8-inch simple swap SSDs are installed, the onboard ServeRAID
C100 SATA controller is used for RAID with those four drives.
if one 3.5-inch SATA drive is installed, two configuration options are possible:
– The single drive in the compute node is connected to the onboard
ServeRAID C100 or SATA controller and is independent from the drives in
the storage tray. No additional components are needed.
– The single drive in the compute node is connected to the ServeRAID
M1115 SAS/SATA controller along with the 7 drives in the storage tray and
all 8 drives can be used to form RAID arrays. This configuration requires a
special internal storage tray as listed in Table 4-17.
Table 4-17 IBM NeXtScale 3.5-inch Hardware RAID cage
Part
number
00Y8615
88
IBM NeXtScale System Planning and Implementation Guide
Feature Description
code
A4GE 3.5" HDD RAID cage for nx360 M4 Storage
Native Expansion Tray
Maximum
supported
1