Internal Storage - IBM Flex System x240 M5 Product Manual

Internal storage

The x240 M5 server has two 2.5-inch hot-swap drive bays that are accessible from the front of the blade
server (see Figure 2). These bays connect to the integrated LSI SAS3004 12 Gbps SAS/SATA
RAID-on-Chip (ROC) controller.
The integrated LSI SAS3004 ROC has the following features:
Four-port LSI SAS3004 controller with 12 Gbps throughput per port

PCIe x4 Gen 2 host interface

Two SAS ports routed internally to the two hot-swap drive bays

Supports RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-1E

The two 2.5-inch front-accessible drive bays can be replaced with four 1.8-inch drive bays, two 1.8-inch
bays replacing each 2.5-inch bay, by using the ServeRAID M1200 RAID 5 Enablement Kit, 00JX141. This
kit contains a replacement backplane to connect the four 1.8-inch SSDs. The kit also includes ServeRAID
M1200 Zero Cache/RAID 5 Upgrade (Feature on Demand license), which adds RAID 5 support. The part
number for this upgrade is listed in the table.
The two standard 2.5-inch SAS/SATA drive bays can also be replaced with new PCIe NVMe
(Non-Volatile Memory Express) drives that are directly connected to the PCIe bus of the second
processor. Such connectivity, when combined with SSD drives, ensures the lowest possible latency while
still using a standard drive form factor.
Support for NVMe drives requires a replacement drive backplane for the two 2.5-inch drives plus the
second processor must also be installed in the server. The kit containing the backplane, NVMe Enterprise
PCIe SSD Enablement Kit for IBM Flex System x240 M5, is listed in the following table.
Table 7. Internal storage upgrades
Part Feature Name and description
number code
00JX141 A5SF ServeRAID M1200 RAID 5 Enablement Kit for IBM Flex System x240 M5
00JX177 A5SH NVMe Enterprise PCIe SSD Enablement Kit for IBM Flex System x240 M5
Supported drives are listed in the "Internal drive options" section.
IBM Flex System x240 M5 Product Guide
Maximum
supported
1
1
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