Hello all,
This is my first post. I am an avid tinkerer and I am getting into soldering motherboards and just general things to occupy my little free time because I like to keep busy.
I recently acquired an Xserve RAID. It came with 7x 750GB IDE hard drives. I am intending to use those hard drives, but I would like to get 7 hard drive caddies for the other side and then convert them to SATA drives so that I can get newer, larger capacity, full 3.5" NAS drives in there. I'm wondering if anyone has tried to do this, and if so how did it turn out.
I have a couple methods that I have thought of doing, and I'm curious to what people think the best way to progress will be.
1.) (easiest) I get adapters and try to figure out how to rework the hard drive caddy so that they can fit the larger drives and use a SATA drive, but the board is still IDE based. We don't get any of the benefits of SATA, just the extra drive space.
2.) (hardest) I try to re-solder the motherboard where the IDE connectors were, and replace them with SATA connectors and just buy SATA extensions and then connect the cables to the existing caddies and try to find a way to keep the hard drive status lights. My only fear with this is that if I put a bunch of drives in there that are 8TBs, it won't see all of the drive and just show me a fraction of the storage's capacity. Also, I don't even know if this would be possible. I haven't taken a look at the board yet, but I would have to assume this wouldn't be easy to do, just fun.
Does anyone know anything about these options, or other ways to incorporate new SATA drives with the former Xserve RAID? Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks!
This is my first post. I am an avid tinkerer and I am getting into soldering motherboards and just general things to occupy my little free time because I like to keep busy.
I recently acquired an Xserve RAID. It came with 7x 750GB IDE hard drives. I am intending to use those hard drives, but I would like to get 7 hard drive caddies for the other side and then convert them to SATA drives so that I can get newer, larger capacity, full 3.5" NAS drives in there. I'm wondering if anyone has tried to do this, and if so how did it turn out.
I have a couple methods that I have thought of doing, and I'm curious to what people think the best way to progress will be.
1.) (easiest) I get adapters and try to figure out how to rework the hard drive caddy so that they can fit the larger drives and use a SATA drive, but the board is still IDE based. We don't get any of the benefits of SATA, just the extra drive space.
2.) (hardest) I try to re-solder the motherboard where the IDE connectors were, and replace them with SATA connectors and just buy SATA extensions and then connect the cables to the existing caddies and try to find a way to keep the hard drive status lights. My only fear with this is that if I put a bunch of drives in there that are 8TBs, it won't see all of the drive and just show me a fraction of the storage's capacity. Also, I don't even know if this would be possible. I haven't taken a look at the board yet, but I would have to assume this wouldn't be easy to do, just fun.
Does anyone know anything about these options, or other ways to incorporate new SATA drives with the former Xserve RAID? Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks!