I got the wrong thing!

[DiG]

Whilst on ebay the other evening I got a bit ahead of myself and purchased an HP DL360 G5.

The idea was that it would replace my ageing home built server that currently has 4 x 2 TB 3.5" SATA hard drives in it and is running Plex and a host of other stuff.

I thought I would just be able to plug in all the hard drives, install ubuntu and be off, however when the server arrived I found to my horror that the bays are 2.5"!

Can I just buy extra long SATA cables and keep the disks outside the server? Will the servers fancy RAID card mean I can't use ZFS as I am at the moment? Have I been an idiot buying stuff I don't understand? (Yes)

Sorry for such amateur questions, any help is appreciated!

 

[DiG]

Not sure I'd want the drives external and it won't be regular sata cables either.

What RAID card is it? For ZFS you'll want to crossflash of with the LSI IT firmware

It's a P400, I've been looking at cables, I've found a SFF-8484 to 4 x sata cable, is this the kind of thing I would need? It doesn't have any power connections so I don't really understand how the drives would be powered!

Enjoy that volume.

I had a bit of a shock when I first turned it on! It will live hidden away so noise isn't much of a concern

 

[DiG]

The old server is built out of old desktop parts, just doesn't have the power needed for Plex transcoding, this has 2 x Xeons and 16 GB of RAM and only cost me £120 so I thought it was a bargain! Clearly not quite as much a bargain as I thought.

Returning to ebay is an option but to be honest, if I can just get the hard drives connected then its perfect for what I need!

Frozennova - Thanks, I'll look up how to flash the RAID card in a bit, when you say separate power cables what kind of thing do you mean? The cables I have been looking at look like they would cover the whole connector on the backplane just for the SATA connectors

 

[DiG]

I just plugged it into a power monitor, 320 Watts! Ok so back on ebay then I think! Calliusmaximus what spec did you go for for your plex server? Is it handling transcoding ok?

 

[DiG]

Thanks for all the advice, the thing that gets me is that 16GB of RAM almost costs as much by itself as the whole server did.

Plus I'd like to have IPMI as it's going to live in the loft and the cheapest motherboard I can find is a Supermicro model that costs £150.

Is consumer hardware still the best way or should I just spend more on a newer more power efficient server on ebay that has 3.5" hard drive bays?