May 20, 201214 yr I'm thinking of using an old IBM server and adding SATA drives for storage. Can the existing SCSI drives (RAID 1) be used for a cache drive?
May 20, 201214 yr What disk controller does it use? The quick answer is probably yes, if unRAID has support for the controller.
May 21, 201214 yr Author The controller is an LSI 1030 on the motherboard. I'm booting up the free/trial version on the server now. Just need to get it base configured so I can get to the menu. The server is an IBM xSeries 336 with 16GB memory, Dual 3.2 GHz Xeon procs, and dual 146GB 15K SCSI drives. These servers can be found on eBay for around $300.
May 21, 201214 yr Author New wrinkle, the dual Gbit interfaces are Broadcom NetXtreme. unRAID is not happy
May 21, 201214 yr Author Just added a Netgear Gbit NIC and got communications. The SCSI drive array doesn't show up as an available drive. Strike 2 :'( For may desired build, I needed both PCI-X slots for SATA controllers to give me 16 disks. The server mother board has 2 SATA ports that I planned to use for the Parity drive and my largest data drive. If there is a solution for the Broadcom NIC, we may still be a go. I'll start investigating plan B.
May 23, 201214 yr Just added a Netgear Gbit NIC and got communications. The SCSI drive array doesn't show up as an available drive. Strike 2 :'( For may desired build, I needed both PCI-X slots for SATA controllers to give me 16 disks. The server mother board has 2 SATA ports that I planned to use for the Parity drive and my largest data drive. If there is a solution for the Broadcom NIC, we may still be a go. I'll start investigating plan B. does their disk controller show up in the syslog? You can certainly compile a kernel with the scsi driver for the disk controller (as long as there is one for Linux) Yes, it is a bit advanced, but it might let you use the old drives.
May 24, 201214 yr Author I've been looking at the VMware approach. I currently run a Xenserver and it would be nice to keep every thing on one box. With the exception of disks, unRAID is light on the resources. The IBM will be put back in the scrap pile as it won't support virtualization.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.