What to do with an Xraid

[uberamd]

I am getting an Xraid (Xserve RAID I guess as its properly called) and I am curious what I should do with it. I am not yet sure on the specs which I assume will influence its capabilities greatly, but I am curious to know if anyone here has used an Xraid before, and can offer guidance on what types of hard drives they accept, etc.

If I recall correctly the current Xserve line requires special Apple only hard drives. The one I am getting (for free so I can't be picky) has 5x100GB hard drives in it currently, and I would gladly expand as long as it won't cost an arm and both legs. Any ideas?

 

[JGruber]

Well the Xserve RAID could be used for Mass Storage, we don't use an Xraid, but the Vtrak system.

On our current Xserve, we bought it with 1 1TB drive, and added the other 2 1TB drives later. No special harddrives at all. All though it did need a special Apple drive bay, to hold the drives, but other than that it was a standered 1TB SATAII drive.

 

[belvdr]

Also note that depending on the model, it may require a specific HBA to connect it to (i.e. Fibre Channel or SCSI).

 

[Azgar]

Welcome to my unhappy place.

We have an Xserve RAID at work and we only have 9 of the drive bays populated. You have to have the Apple Drive Modules to put in a drive. The thing doesn't come with empty ADMs, just a bunch of blank inserts. Since they don't make the ADMs for this anymore, you'll end up paying an arm and a leg on eBay or the like to get them. They take PATA drives. As far as I know, you don't need any special type of PATA drive, and they appear to be still generally available.

 

[uberamd]

Welcome to my unhappy place.

We have an Xserve RAID at work and we only have 9 of the drive bays populated. You have to have the Apple Drive Modules to put in a drive. The thing doesn't come with empty ADMs, just a bunch of blank inserts. Since they don't make the ADMs for this anymore, you'll end up paying an arm and a leg on eBay or the like to get them. They take PATA drives. As far as I know, you don't need any special type of PATA drive, and they appear to be still generally available.

Crap, I don't really have any extra arms or legs! Looks like I will maybe be pulling out the 5 100GB drives in it and replacing them with 500GB drives vs. trying to fill the remaining bays.

Thats one thing that gets me about large servers: empty drive bay inserts. We got a large Dell server at work a few weeks ago and it only had empty inserts. We needed some caddies to put the drives in and Dell told us we had to order the caddies when we ordered the server. THAT WASN'T AN OPTION! Nowhere on the configuration site did it say "extra caddies." Ugh, after much arguing they finally let us buy some.