DELL PERC H840 Dual Port SAS External 12Gb/s RAID Card Adapter 012W3T

Dell PERC H840 Dual-Port 12Gb/s External SAS RAID Controller

The Dell Part Number 012W3T (Alternate P/Ns: 12W3T, GD93V, 70RV1) identifies the Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) H840. It is an enterprise-grade, high-performance external storage expansion solution designed for Dell PowerEdge 14th, 15th, and 16th generation server architectures. Powered by a high-speed LSI SAS3508 Dual-Core ARM A15 RAID-on-Chip (RoC) processor, this PCI Express 3.1 x8 host bus adapter is purpose-built to seamlessly connect, manage, and scale external direct-attached storage (DAS) enclosures like the Dell PowerVault MD and ME series.

Equipped with a 4GB (or 8GB depending on configuration manufacturing batches) Non-Volatile (NV) Flash-Backed Cache, it balances supreme I/O processing with bulletproof data integrity under performance-heavy transactional and enterprise virtualization workloads.

Key Features & Capabilities

• 12Gb/s High-Speed SAS Pipe: Provides line-rate 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) throughput per port, delivering unmatched performance for enterprise multi-drive setups, and is fully backward compatible with 6Gb/s SATA arrays.

• Non-Volatile (NV) Flash Caching: Integrates a large onboard DDR4 NV cache that substantially accelerates read and write response patterns. In a power loss event, cached data is instantly dumped to flash memory via a battery-backed backup logic path, preventing silent loss of pending transactions.

• Massive Scalability: Features two external x4 mini-SAS HD ports (SFF-8644), enabling system engineers to securely cascade and daisy-chain up to 192 (or a maximum limits of 255) physical Hard Drives or Solid State Drives (SSDs).

• Comprehensive Hardware RAID Matrix: Offloads all compute-intensive array calculations onto the dedicated hardware controller, providing robust fault tolerance across RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60.

• Advanced Data Management Tools: Supports seamless Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) and Online RAID Level Migration (RLM), enabling data storage volume expansion without tearing down current production environments or interrupting live system operations.

Technical Specifications