The XServe RAID

[iSteve]

Hello,

 

Not sure if anyone is still using these units, but we are and are too skint to replace them with more modern options (ie, Promise).

 

As you may know, getting "official" Apple drives for these is difficult. We have had success getting the drive carriers and installing standard PATA drives inside them, but I found a website detailing using SATA drives in the old drive carriers (link to come).

 

The solution is to use the StarTech sata2ide bridge, which is small enough to stand up in the drive carrier. This then allows you to use 2.5" SATA hard drives, or SSDs in the XServe RAID. This makes replacing drives MUCH cheaper than Apple's offerings.

 

We are about to start trialling some WD Scorpio Black drives in our RAID. The site I found info on said the controllers will recognise up to 1TB drives.

 

Good news for those still running these bits of kit.

[HodgeHi]

We purchased some old hitachi IDE drives from Misco instead of Apple's extortionate offering. 500GB HDDs they were for around £49. We used to have 1TB striped RAID and now have 2 1TB arrays with 1 mirroring (0+1 is it?)

 

I am looking to obtain either an XServe before they go or a mac pro with the drive bays and a raid card or just flesh out the remaining HDD bays in the XServe. This will give us more space than the XRAID without the hassle of finding the carriers.