[geeks] FYI - Low cost Dell Opteron Servers

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
>Date: 2008/03/25 Tue AM 11:05:51 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] FYI - Low cost Dell Opteron Servers

>On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 11:55:59AM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>
>> For just extra storage, sure, though I would likely use Firewire.
>> 
>> I meant something like one primary OS drive, and a pair of bays for  
>> RAID.
>
>I see what you mean.
>
>At this point I wouldn't do that anymore if I could in any way avoid it
>though.  I want mirrored boot as well, if at all possible.  So, two
>versus three bays doesn't bother me so much.  If it had three, I'd just
>be saying what you are now saying.

Three drives is no problem - the MB has 4x SATA ports on-board, the DVD is SATA, leaving three ports available. Putting a third drive in the 5 1/4" bay is a real no-brainer and will *absolutely* work for your situation.

Depending on what you want to boot off of, there is an IDE controller, so you could add an IDE -> Compact Flash adapter[0] and boot off a CF card, leaving two (or three) HD bays without touching the floppy bay. For further expansion, I'd look to eSATA - I just saw some nice IOGear SATA controllers (PCI Express 1x, 2 port external and they support port multipliers) for about $35 at microcenter.com[1][2].

Lionel

[0] http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0255159

[1] http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0281551

[2] http://www.iogear.com/product/GICe702S3R5W6/