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Power Edge 2650 with SATA/SAS drives and WinXP
We have two PE-2650's with the SCSI-SCA drives. They currently have Red Hat Enterprise installed. These two boxes have been retired from active use and I would like to re-purpose them.
Problem one is the drives, SCSI-SCA drives are expensive and SATA/SAS drives are just as fast and both cheaper and higher capacity. Is there still a backplane available for the 2650 and SATA/SAS drives? What else would be needed for this conversion other than a controller card to connect to the SATA/SAS backplane?
Problem two is the OS. We have two available, legal, licenses for WinXP that would be perfectly adequate for what we are planning for these two systems. Are there any known driver issues I should be aware of?
Other than the hard drives really, the two systems still have plenty of horsepower for what we have intended for them. One to be a mini file server and the other running our internal antivirus server.
theflash1932
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September 4th, 2012 11:00
No, the 2650 only supports SCSI. This model is 10 years old and can't be retrofitted to support SAS/SATA. The 9th generation of Dell servers (2950, etc.) was the first to support SAS/SATA.
There are many issues running XP on this machine (at least in RAID mode). There was no system using this RAID controller for which XP drivers were ever created. 2003 drivers will "usually" (but not always) work for XP, however, I seem to recall some threads in which this was attempted but not successful on a 2650. Several devices will not work even if you do get it installed (ERA, for example). In theory, you could turn RAID off and run in SCSI mode to avoid that particular driver issue, although I'm not sure if you will run into another with the SCSI controller.
DELL-Chris H
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September 4th, 2012 11:00
James,
The 2650 only supports SCSI. It doesn't support the use of SAS or SATA drives, or a SAS/SATA controller.
As far as XP, it is a workstation OS, so it isn't supported on servers. That isn't saying it wouldn't work, it just isn't a recommended OS.
You would be best off using the Windows Server 2003 driver for your controller, as that is the closest to XP..