Missing harddrive

If I remember that acronym correctly and was used on the Apples a long time ago.

On the down side they are much more expensive than IDE or SATA generally speaking about 3 times as expensive as the equivalent IDE HDD.

However on the up side they are much faster and fit with a server far better than the IDE or SATA drives can ever hope to achieve. Currently the biggest easily obtainable SCSI HDD is 300 GIG and comes in around $1,400.00 AU. The main difference is that you can add more SCSI Devices per channel and they have a much faster Data Transfer Rate. They are ideally fitted to File Servers where the Seek Time is important on a large LAN.

The original Drive should have been branded as HP/Compaq so if you have one of those it's a fairly safe bet that it's the original HDD that came with the Server. Only a complete Idiot would pay HP's prices for a HDD that can be brought anywhere cheaper and generally speaking in a case like a Seagate Drive have a longer guarantee.

Actually just for your information there are 2 types of SCSI drives one is the normal type that the computer has to be shut down to replace and they have their own power lead to the drive, the other type is called a Hot Swap Drive and has a different connector that takes both the data & power leads into the drive. Generally speaking these are much taller than the conventional SCSI drives and also a lot more expensive.

As far as the so called upgrade to 150 GIG I would have to look at the supplied invoice to tell you what has happened here as until recently the average SCSI HDD was smaller than 150 GIG the biggest one being 146 GIG for a couple of years now and a lot smaller even now the current largest one listed on my current Price List is 300 GIG but the next size down is 146 followed by 73 & 36 GIG capacity.

With modern SCSI controllers you can fit 15 of these per Chanel and the older SCSI controllers had a limit of 7 per Chanel.

I hope that is of some use to you.

Col

But it should be a fairly simple matter to increase the RAID array to more drives. You just have to get the correct type of drive for that unit as from your description it would appear that you have Hot Swappable Drives fitted [i]The outside ones[/i] But depending on the maker they sometimes made up a caddy to accept the cheaper SCSI drives so that they could act like a Hot Swappable SCSI drive but at a lower price of a standard SCSI HDD.

However it should just be a natter of fitting the drives and formatting them up then rebooting and entering the RAID Configuration utility and setting the 2 additional drives as required. Though I would strongly suggest that you have a solid backup in place just in case as some RAID controllers don't always work the way that you intend them to perform.

HP should have a well written section in the manual for this setup and how to achieve it and you can always download the manual from the HP Web Site if you can not lay your hands on the original.

Servers can be difficult beasts at the best of times and downright impossible when you are not on your guard with the monsters.

I really would recommend that you read the users manual to get the correct directions for the RAID Controller that has been used in this particular unit and at the same time read up if it will rebuild the Array if one of the drives fails. This is a very important feature that is quite often overlooked.

The next thing would be what I would consider fairly obvious but many overlook you don't want to play with this unit at a Critical Business time so I would start to think about fitting new Drives late in the day after the bulk of the work has been done so if it goes down you are not adversely impacting on the staff's ability to do their work. You will not believe the screams of horror if you pull a Mail Server in the middle of the day within 30 seconds you will have a string of calls a mile long telling you that the Mail Server is down and this is after you have told everyone that you'll be pulling it to do some maintenance. If you don't bother telling them all hell breaks loose as people believe that they just can not work without E-Mail. File Servers come a very close second when you are playing with them as well. :^0

If possible make sure that you have a Cloned Boot Drive so if everything goes wrong it's just a matter of swapping the boot drive and rebooting to have the system up & running again. A 5 minute change over is much better than a half day or longer rebuild on any mission critical unit. Believe me this is something that you don't want to experience first hand.

Lets know if I can be of any help

Col