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I have a IBM eServer xSeries 346, does anyone has experience with the ServeRaid-7k, to create a RAID array? Also, you can ask me anything about this 2005 beast! (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by Krafting to c/selfhosted

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[–] peregus 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Avoid hardware RAID (have a look at this). Use Linux MD or BTRFS or ZFS.

[–] Krafting 16 points 7 months ago (4 children)

It's a 2004 server, you can't do anything else but HW RAID on this. also, it's using UltraSCSI (and you should not use that in 2024 either ahah)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

SCSI was creme de la creme ages ago! Is it not a matter of going in its BIOS, configure the hardware RAID (go for mirror only!?), endure the noise it probably makes, and install ? :)

[–] Krafting 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Indeed! I have a lot of SCSI disks, PCI cards and a few cables too! (also, SCSI is fun to pronounce... SKEUZY) but on this server, the RAID card doesn't have any option to create a RAID in its BIOS, from what I can tell it needs a special software and I can't find good tutorials or documentation out there :(

[–] spacepotato 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You can find the 7.12.x support CD for that controller at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-serveraid-software-matrix. I'm pretty sure that server model did not support USB booting so you'll need to burn that to a disc. This will be the disc to boot off of to create your array(s).

I forget if the support CD had the application you would install in Windows to manage things after installation or not, or if that's only on the application CD. Either way you'll find several downloads for various OS drivers and the applications from that matrix.

[–] Krafting 2 points 7 months ago

Thanks for the link! I'll definitely need to try this... I have a few CDs laying around, I'll burn one!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

my scsi controller needs to be entered during boot to manage raid. it also has an external battery that needed replacing (which cost more new than just buying a new card ... with the exact same battery) so if you're not in verbose boot mode figure that out and see if the controller is telling you which function key it needs.

figuring out this old stuff is most of the fun in running it, I would sell it as scrap before actually hosting anything on it.

[–] Krafting 1 points 7 months ago

Yeah I already have the key combo to enter the RAID card BIOS, CTRL + i

And yeah I won't be hosting anything on it obviously, I just love old hardware and trying to push them tp their limit!

[–] peregus 2 points 7 months ago

I did not know that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Why is that? Does the motherboard effectively just not have enough inputs for all the disks, so that's why you need dedicated hardware that handles some kind of raid configuration, and in the end the motherboard just sees it all as one drive? I never really understood what SCSI was for. How do the drives connect, SATA/PATA/something else?

[–] Krafting 3 points 7 months ago

SCSI is its own thing, to fix some issues with IDE iirc. The drive backplane is directly attached to the motherboard, well, more specifically to the RAID Card on the Motherboard, then the RAID card give the OS/Motherboard access to the configured RAID disk that you have created, but not to the disks themselves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Well, you could make each disk its own RAID 0 array. There would probably be performance overhead compared to just using the hardware RAID though.