I just picked up 2 HP Proliant DL360 servers today (one with 2 3.0ghz Xeon's and one with 2 3.2Ghz Xeon's)
one of which came with a 15k SCSI U320 hdd, i was wondering if it is worth worth me investing in more, or if i should add a sata card and "bodge" some sata hdd's in?

ie. is it worth sacrificing on space for speed?

and on a side note, is there any cheap sata drive towers out there? (not like a £400 drobo) preferably firewire

SCSI is all Serial-Attached-SCSI (SAS) now AFAIK, which uses the same interface as SATA. So it's probably not worth the money...

No, not really worth it to continue investing in SCSI.

Get a backplane (http://www.velocitytechsolutions.com/hp ... ane-board/) that will handle SAS/SATA, decent SAS/SATA card if needed, and use some Raptors or SAS drives for speed, or alternatively, SSD's. SCSI is dead though.

These drives are pretty expensive, I've got 6 servers with them and to upgrade from 36 to 74 gig drives on the 5 with hard drives it would be close to $400.

ok, ill just use sata, i don't think im gonna get a backplane right now (because i want to use my 15k drive for boot) and yeah they are pretty expensive, i was looking at about £15 - £20 for a 146 gb disk

Well, actually your wrong, SCSI and SCISI-SAS are 2 different things.

These servers using SCSI Ultra320, those discs are expensive but faster then regular harddrives (more then double the speed).
SCSI would only be worth it if this server is really used as a server which needs great HD speed.

If you really want HD Space, build your own storage pc, which would be more silent then those servers.
And you get an different CPU config, these are the Xeon Based on the Pentium 4 architecture, not the Core 2 or Core iX.

the reason i brought servers is that my chepo boards weren't cutting it (and because i always wanted some 1u rackmount servers)
Is it possible to upgrade the cpu to a core 2 / core i based ones?, i might take a old / slow board and add a load of sata cards and use it as a storage tower.

I doubt it. Unless these had an option for dual core processors. I have one server that I can upgrade to dual cores since Dell had support for them in this model (PE1850).

No, Core 2 is socket LGA775, the Core i series chips are either LGA1155/6 or 1366.



I know that... I was saying that Ultra320 is dead. In it's place is SAS. Besides, for some guy who just picked up some rack-mount servers because he "always wanted some" it would be a huge waste of money.

There are some Xeons based off the Core 2 Duos. Your server is probably a socket 604, like all of mine but one. I want to find the 2.8 GHz dual core Xeon set for one of my poweredge 1850s for faster speed.

I am rather poor and got a 17gb IBM PIII server cheaply.
I didnt know that it had that less capacity.