Question Regarding the Dell PowerEdge 2950

[xxsk8er101xx]

Hey there,

So I was able to snag a Dell PowerEdge 2950 from work and take it home. They even gave me 4x 73GB 15k SAS drives to go with it. I've upgraded it to 2 quad core 5345's xeons and 8GB of RAM. Unfortunately

The Server has a perc 5/i SAS RAID card w/ 256MB of RAM.

So I've tried to put sata drives in there using SAS caddy's but it doesn't detect the drives. Then I read online that you have to buy these interposer boards that are 20 bucks a pop plus another 20 for the Satau caddy's making it a total of 40 dollars for a tray. I'm thinking the cost is just ridiculous for a tray.

The reason I want to use SATA is because I already have 3 SATA drives. 640gb,750gb, 1TB.

My question is; is there another way to get SATA drives working on the Dell PowerEdge 2950?
Do I have to upgrade the card to perc 6/i and would that work with the PowerEdge 2950?

Any opinions or thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks!

 

[fb39ca4]

PCIe SATA controller? You will have to find another housing for the drives though.

 

[xxsk8er101xx]

SAS should be backwards compatible with Sata. I'm not understanding why the drives don't work and why a interposer board is required.

There's not a whole lot of difference between sata and SAS trays. It's just the placement of the drive and on the SATAu trays the end of the tray is short so you can fit these interposer boards.

PCIe SATA controller? You will have to find another housing for the drives though.

 

[xxsk8er101xx]

I think what I'll do is buy some SAS drives. Found some cheap on ebay. Cheaper than normal 80gig sata drives too. Then just get an esata external drive to store data. I'm pretty sure I can setup a vmware datastore on a esata drive.

If you want to learn virtualization and you have a spare PC just sitting there go to this link and read about it. http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/
and then go here http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html to download it for FREE.

vmware is awesome to allow their product to be used for free. They even have a few modules that we can download for free such as the vmware client (to connect to the server) and the vmware converter (convert anything and load it on your newly installed vmware server). It's pretty cool and fun to learn. You do have to register it but that's free also.I can tell you that it's very similar to what is used in the enterprise version.

Note: Vmware hypervisor is an operating system and it will format your drive and delete everything so do not load this on your nice windows 7 gaming machine.

Thanks!