Printable View
Okay, Friday afternoon brainfart. Horribly underspecced server with a tiny non raid SCSI HD. Any reason why I can't throw a pair of decent IDE drives onto ATA raid controller and use them for additional data storage? Don't want to move any of the OS, just use it for user data. Nagging feeling that it's all going to go pear shaped, but can't think why... :roll:
You should be OK to do this. The reason for using SCSI is for the access speeds, but I can't see a reason for any problems. Our system uses all SCSI hard drives, but I use IDE at home over a wireless network with no problems.
Will work out a lot cheaper as well.
We have several servers with both SCSI and IDE drives, no problems at all.
What about using something like a Terrastation (inexpensive NAS box with RAID HDDs).
Shouldn't be a problem - if you're going S-ATA or P-ATA RAId, I'd recommended using a plug-in controller card, as opposed to onboard RAID, so that if the motherboard in your server or the plug-in controller goes, you can easily swap out a replacement controller and still have access to your RAID arrays.
Incidently, my 3 servers at work have 2 S-ATA RAID arrays and LTO-2 tape drives hanging off the SCSI controller in each of them. I've also run SCSI / IDE on my personal system at home a few years back without any problems. In fact, I once had a plug-in ATA card, plus the two on-board ATA channels and a plug-in SCSi controller in the same box which all ran OK.
Most drive manufacturers run a seperate product line for "Enterprise" drives. These go into servers and are generally rated with a much hight MTBF (mean time between failure).
Which in practical terms means that if you take a bog-standard IDE drive and run it in a server that's taking a greater work load than a stand-alone PC, then the drive WILL fail quicker than the more expensive "Enterprise" drive.
The upside is that if you RAID it, when it fails the recovery will just be another cheapo drive. If the server is V.low usage - take the savings.