Hello Everyone, I just purchased a Dell PowerEdge 840 server off of ebay. A couple of things are confusing me. One, is the fact that there an IDE Cable that is connected to the DVD reader. However there is a empty slot where I think a IDE hard drive could be placed. There an additional IDE connector on the same cable as the DVD. Does anyone know if there was a tray or sled that goes into this slot? It certainly doesn't look like you could mount a hard drive in there without an adapter. I guess the question that I'm asking is "Can the OS be installed on an IDE drive and run separately from the raid?" Here's the Specs. 1x Intel Core 2 Dual Core 2.20ghz CPU 4x 1gb DDR2 ECC Memory 2x 750gb SATA 3.5" Hard Drives SAS5 RAID Controller DVD-Rom/CD+/-RW Optical Drive 1x Onboard Gigabit Ethernet 16mb Onboard Video (VGA) And .... Don't make fun of me .... I'm a Newbie!
Hi Denco, I've been running 2 of those (PE840) for 5 years 24x7 and they are very solid, no problems. I use SATA drives, the IDE connector is only for the optical drive, I would recomend to just create an OS partition and a Data partition when you configure your raid. get at least 3 drives and it looks like the raid controller is SAS so you probably will have to get SAS drives, unless you have a Raid Controller for your SATA drives. good luck. Alex.
Thanks, to all. I did figure out how to get the OS installed. It took a little doing in the the bios. I also broke the RAID because I would rather use a Drive extender substitute so that when I install the extra drives it will be seen a JOBD. I'm using Windows Home Server 2011 for now. The purpose of this experiment is to familiarize myself with the Server's OS. On the subject of the the drives, I pulled one out and they definable say SATA on them. So, I'm not sure if I really need SAS Drives.
SATA are ok, SAS are scusi drives more expensive, potentially faster if you get the faster ones but will produce more heat. I would keep the SATA drives. If your accessing the disks independently you should be ok, if you stripe them into one logical volume then, my only concern is that if one drive fails you will loose all data.
While I agree with you that a Raid setup would be better. It just seems to me that to implement it comes at such a high disk cost. My main objective for this Server was to set it up solely as a Backup Server for about ten maybe twelve work stations. I planned to make an image of each workstation and later on setup some sort of incremental backup strategy. So, the server wouldn't be working that hard. Please correct me if I'm wrong. My biggest concern is that I at least have an Image should one of the workstations flake out. There are no restore disks, or anything for that matter to to recover from in the event of a disaster.
I agree with you, I just went through a harware issue 3 weeks ago. I had a RAID 5, using it as a shared storage for VMS, on another partition I had Disk images, but had no backups, I was keeping the last 14 days of veeam VM backups, the raid went down, I replaced a disk, had the raid replicate to the new disk everything look fine, my Email VM got corrupted somehow, I said no problem we have the backups of the VM from last night, it was a succesful backup, when I tried to restore the file somehow got corrupted, haaaaa.... I had to restore from 3 days behind, but I learned my lesson, no I keep backups on another storage system.....
I'm no hardware guru, but as I understand it RAID 5 Is supposed to have a parity disk. The way I understood it was that any if any disk failed the Parity disk would enable you to restore. But, like I said, I'm no hardware guru, let alone knowing anything about VMS!
Hi Denco i have recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge 840 from Ebay and i have been trying for two weeks now to try and install an OS, i have tried Windows XP and Windows Home Server 2011 but i have no luck i have checked everything in the BIOS but it will not boot up to either disk or USB flash drive i need your help. Thanks