HP ML350 G6 SATA Ports

[ITGURU]

I have a ML350 G6 server which I have maxed out the 8 drive bays. I am unable to acquire the second drive bay kit as no longer made, but see that there are onboard SATA ports on the motherboard.

 

I can disconnect the DVD drive and connect a Standard SATA drive to the cable and the OS picks it up in disk management no problem.

 

However, if I then add another drive to the second port, or more the single drive from port 1 to any of the other ports, the disk isn't seen in disk management.

 

is there something I have to do to enable the other sata ports to work, so I can expand the number of drives?

 

Also, if I am using the onboard sata ports I assume they will not be hot-swap and if a drive experiences an issue or fails, it may crash the server if it's not removed safely?

 

Appreciate any advice on this.

 

Thanks.

[mtillbrook]

Hi

Interesting post! The first thing i should probably say (although i'm sure you know this) is that a G6 is quite old now!

Have you looked on ebay and similar sites for a second drive bay?

 

As far as the hard drives go, no, the mboard isn't designed to have multiple drives plugged straight in the on-board sata ports. I don't think there is a way around this I'm afraid.

You are correct though, anything you do plug into onboard sata ports wouldnt be hot-swappable. Its the back plane (i think) that makes them so!

 

I hope that helps?

[ITGURU]

Hi

Interesting post! The first thing i should probably say (although i'm sure you know this) is that a G6 is quite old now!

Have you looked on ebay and similar sites for a second drive bay?

 

As far as the hard drives go, no, the mboard isn't designed to have multiple drives plugged straight in the on-board sata ports. I don't think there is a way around this I'm afraid.

You are correct though, anything you do plug into onboard sata ports wouldnt be hot-swappable. Its the back plane (i think) that makes them so!

 

I hope that helps?

 

Yep looked on ebay but unable to find! As for the G6 it may be old but still packs performance - I am still running several G6 servers 6+ years old with dual 6 core processors and plenty of RAM and other schools ask me what the spec of our SIMS server is as its fast - what takes them an hour to run, takes our server 10 minutes!

 

They are all running 2012 R2 as well without any issues!

[mtillbrook]

yer, don't get me wrong, they are great bits of kit, just ageing a little!

 

I've used ML350's since about the G2 i think and they all keep going for what seems to be years!!

[m25man]

Easiest way around this is a cheap iscsi array.

I have an old ReadyNas Pro attached to my G5

[Guest obsidianpillar]

I stumbled across this thread when I was looking for my own G6. This one's for a G5 however may be of some relevance?

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/64375-hp-proliant-ml350-g5-adding-extra-drives.html

 

I eventually ended up just adding bigger capacity drives as being that it was in a home lab, It didn't work out as too expensive in comparison to adding another drive bay. I second what was said about the G6's being still pretty powerful. Mine's running happy with 2012 R2 Datacenter and 40GB's of RAM. Pretty happy and don't see myself changing it anytime soon for anything bigger and better.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Best,

Tom

[ITGURU]

What size drives are you using. I've had reliable 300gb drives but are the 600 ones as reliable?

[ITGURU]

I could isci the server to my backup box with the 3TB drives which is an HP microserver but it doesn't have the power redundancy like the ML350.

[Guest obsidianpillar]

We used 2TB's from HP (WD Enterprise drives).