# DELL PowerEdge RAID Setup



## RY4N-H0850N

Hello everyone.

I am waiting on an 'DELL PowerEdge 2600" server, which currently has no hard drives in it. I was wondering, can i actually just put a standard hard drive into this server? I have a 500GB SATA drive here, and was wondering if I could put that into it save buying 2 or 3 hard drives and setting up RAID.

Thanks


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## bilbus

If its a PERC card .. and hotswap .. it can only take SCSI .. no SATA.
If you have an addin card, you can add SATA if it supports it. I have never seen a 2600 with SATA


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## RY4N-H0850N

So even if its SCSI does that mean I can have 1 SCSI drive without RAID?

e.g. a 500GB SCSI drive, installed by itself, showing 500GB?

Thanks for the reply btw.


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## RY4N-H0850N

Does anybody know if I could do that ?

Thanks


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## RY4N-H0850N

Anybody?


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## Black6

Sure, you can have one big SCSI drive but it kind of defeats the purpose of having a Raid controller and large SCSI drives still tend to be quite a bit more expensive than several smaller ones.


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## RY4N-H0850N

Ahh rite, thanks for the reply mate... Didn't think I was gonna get one :/
lol

Thanks again...


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## RY4N-H0850N

Hello again,

I re-read the comment about the SATA with a DELL PowerEdge 2600.

Does this mean I can buy a controller card, the same as SCSI with the SATA interface?

This would be a big help for me as SATA is almost as good as SCSI nowadays (speed-wise), which the drives are cheaper, and I would set up RAID 10 (1/0) with this.

Thanks, 

Ryan


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## bilbus

You can buy a sata controler and install drives .. but if you have a hot swap bay, you must use scsi, it can not take sata.

If you have free slots inside the server you can  buy a mounting kit, to use sata.

A decent SATA drive will out preform a scsi drive.

Yes you can use a single scsi drive in raid or non raid on a 2600.

Raid 10, is 4+ hard drives by the way.

Scsi drives (above 36gb) will run you much more then sata.

I bought 73gb scsis for $200 each a while back. I bought 146gb SAS (not sata) drives for $160.


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## RY4N-H0850N

Ahh rite thanks mate...

Another thing - does anybody know whether the DELL PowerEdge 2600 only supports U320? And not U3?

Just had a look at a DELL PowerEdge 2600 Specification List and it doesn't mention anything about the U3 data transfer rate.

(http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/2600_specs.pdf)

I think what I am going to do is if the on-board RAID controller does not support RAID 0/1, then I will buy another RAID controller and have it run RAID 0/1 with 4 73GB CSA HDD's.

Again, if anybody could advise me better on this then please do.

Thanks again, 

Ryan


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