OK I'm bringing this thread back from the grave w/ an update :light:. Here is some information that some people may find useful:
- Compaq Proliant servers based on P3 667's use a proprietary SCSI carriage for drives mounted in the external SCSI rack (there are G1, G2, and G3 versions; the one I have been dealing with is a G1)
- there is NO ROOM inside the chassis for IDE hard drives; only 3 5.25" bays to accomodate CD-ROM drives and such
- an 18GB 10K SCSI drive for the server costs $650CDN from Compaq
Here is my plan:
1. Build an archival storage machine based on Windows XP Pro. In essence it will have two 250GB SATA drives in RAID-1, along with a DVD burner. It will also serve as a print server.
2. Back up the current 18GB drives to another workstation on the network (possibly two for redundancy?).
3. Disassemble one current 18GB drive chassis and replace the 18GB drive with a 74GB 10K SCSI (~$400CDN). There is no OS on the current drive, only files.
4. Enjoy the increased storage capacity.
I figure that down the line I can disassemble the other chassis, install and format a new drive, and install Windows XP Server, or potentially Longhorn if/when it is released, and again, enjoy even more storage capacity.
Here are the specs of the "Archival Server"
- ASUS P4E motherboard (SATA RAID onboard)
- 1.8GB Celeron *groan*
- 2 250GB Maxtor SATA drives w/ 16MB cache
- some crappy ATI video card (AGP)
- 512mb of RAM
- Pioneer 109 DVD burner
I could use some ideas on a backup solution for the main server. It will need to be capable of backing up 92GB of data. My thought is software that will copy the contents of the server to one of the workstations on a daily basis. I don't have the name of the program off-hand, but it essentially "syncs" a server folder with a location on one of the workstations in the office. It would be nice to have something that can store the data off-site. An external USB hard drive is probably the way to go...it would be awesome if I could get a 3.5" laptop drive that could do the job.
Ideas people, ideas! :beer: