bought a cheap server

[gamerdude1989]

hey guys

bought a cheap server off ebay. only cost me £23, just to add to my rack, as my mrs wants something safe to store her precious photos/video's on..
She had an external HDD, but that started acting up, and luckily i managed to copy the contents onto my computer just before it failed completely..

So, i bought a Dell Poweredge 2950 III, doesnt need to be super powerful..
it was cheap because it has no CPU, but ive got a few Xeon E5345 Quad Cores sitting around, so no issue..

Im a bit confused though, as the spec sheet states "6x 15k SCSI or 7.2k Sata"...
How does that work? does the back plate for the hot swap caddies have both, SCSI connections, aswell as Sata connections then?

Screen shot from Dell Spec sheet:::

would be good if it did support Sata drives straight in the bays, But not a big issue if it dont, as i can always put some Sata raid cards in the PCI slots and run it sata that way..
As i want to have all 6 bays occupied with 1tb HDD's, and have them RAID 1 for each drive, so that each drive has its own backup drive...

cheers

 

[Thelosouvlakia]

If I can recall correctly a couple of Sun workstations we have at the department have a backplane that is both sata and SAS compatible at the same time. you just slide in any drive and the motherboard does the job itself

 

[tokih]

SAS hardware is compatible wit SATA, but not the other way though. You will be fine. However, you do need drive carriers suitable for SATA drives. Also, I would recommend using RAID5 or RAID6, as you would get 1-2 drive fault tolerance with 4-5x read speed across the board.