Dear All,
After a few days of searching forums and using good old Google I need your help.
I have got hold of a HP DL380 G4 that my work was just going to dispose of! It has dual Xeon processors, 3GB of RAM and 6*36GB SCSI HDDs.
The problem is that the drives are all connected to the integrated Smart Array 6i Ultra320 Array Controller (with the 128MB of Battery Backed Write Cache). You cannot select anything other than a RAID configuration; there is no JBOD ("Just a Bunch of Disks") option. Adding a larger single drive won't work as it still is created as RAID 0 even if only one disk is installed. There is also the minimum HDD size of 65GB issue with my current 36GB drives.
If I RAID 0 two drives to get 72GB the WHS installer refuses to install as it detects the RAID setup.
The only thing I can think of doing is trying to find a PCI-X (not PCI-E!) compatible SATA controller that allows for JBOD and see if the server will boot off that? I'm pretty sure you can add a PCI card into a PCI-X slot as long as it is 3.3v.
The only other options I can see is to simply put Server 2003/8 on the hardware (but lose the user options I really want from WHS) or build a WHS machine from scratch.
Any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated!
Regards,
NoOnions
After a few days of searching forums and using good old Google I need your help.
I have got hold of a HP DL380 G4 that my work was just going to dispose of! It has dual Xeon processors, 3GB of RAM and 6*36GB SCSI HDDs.
The problem is that the drives are all connected to the integrated Smart Array 6i Ultra320 Array Controller (with the 128MB of Battery Backed Write Cache). You cannot select anything other than a RAID configuration; there is no JBOD ("Just a Bunch of Disks") option. Adding a larger single drive won't work as it still is created as RAID 0 even if only one disk is installed. There is also the minimum HDD size of 65GB issue with my current 36GB drives.
If I RAID 0 two drives to get 72GB the WHS installer refuses to install as it detects the RAID setup.
The only thing I can think of doing is trying to find a PCI-X (not PCI-E!) compatible SATA controller that allows for JBOD and see if the server will boot off that? I'm pretty sure you can add a PCI card into a PCI-X slot as long as it is 3.3v.
The only other options I can see is to simply put Server 2003/8 on the hardware (but lose the user options I really want from WHS) or build a WHS machine from scratch.
Any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated!
Regards,
NoOnions