Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
3 Posts
0
6758
September 1st, 2005 08:00
Adding S-ATA controller to 1400SC
Hello all!
I am looking to convert a used PowerEdge 1400SC (sTag: 3PBC40J) to a storage server for a small office. The system boots and runs off of an 18G SCSI disk, but for cost reasons (and because the server will be far from critical to the business) I am looking to use regular ATA or S-ATA disks for storage. I have learned from this forum that if an hard disk is detected on the IDE chain that's what the server will boot from, but I am looking to use a third party controller. The one I am looking at now is the Promise S-ATA TX4. This comes in both 33MHz and 66MHz PCI versions. Now, on to my question: Will this controller, or a similar one, work as expected? i.e. can I still boot and run the system from the SCSI disk and use the disks connected to the new controller for storage? Though I doubt it has any consequence to my question, the system will be running either Linux or OpenBSD.
Thank you for a great forum.
Håkan Wikström
I am looking to convert a used PowerEdge 1400SC (sTag: 3PBC40J) to a storage server for a small office. The system boots and runs off of an 18G SCSI disk, but for cost reasons (and because the server will be far from critical to the business) I am looking to use regular ATA or S-ATA disks for storage. I have learned from this forum that if an hard disk is detected on the IDE chain that's what the server will boot from, but I am looking to use a third party controller. The one I am looking at now is the Promise S-ATA TX4. This comes in both 33MHz and 66MHz PCI versions. Now, on to my question: Will this controller, or a similar one, work as expected? i.e. can I still boot and run the system from the SCSI disk and use the disks connected to the new controller for storage? Though I doubt it has any consequence to my question, the system will be running either Linux or OpenBSD.
Thank you for a great forum.
Håkan Wikström
No Events found!
warwizard55
720 Posts
0
September 1st, 2005 16:00
Hakan,
Dell does support using something like that controller, they call it
P/N 9K646, ATA 100 IDE Controller, CERC 4 channel RAID
you'll need to configure 1 drive per channel, as IDE cannot read/write to the master and the slave at the same time, there is a huge performance hit when you try to make a RAID array with master/slave drives.
You'll need one of these cables per each drive:
P/N 5P434, IDE Controller Cable Assembly (Used with ATA 100 Controller)Now for the boot question... you could put a lilo or whatever the Linux/BSD equavalent to the M/S Boot.ini file on which ever disk it tries to boot to, and redirect it to the correct controller and disk.
If you go with the Dell provided controller, drivers and management utilities are there for RH 9.0 and AS2.1, but I did not see listings for freeBSD.
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/type.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz&SystemID=PWE_PNT_P3C_1400&os=LN90&osl=en&deviceid=2624
warwizard DCSP
hakan.wikstrom
3 Posts
0
September 1st, 2005 19:00
About the boot configuration; I was thinking perhaps the SCSI subsystem isn't initialized when the system tries to boot from the onboard or external (as in a controller added by myself) IDE. I will dig up an old PCI ATA controller and see if it works before buying something new for production use.
Thanks again.
Håkan