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Saturday 1 April 2017

Some failings of the 1950

The Dell 1950 III is a fine server, but today I discovered a weakness, and something I hadn't known.

The weakbess is that if you use the built-in SAS controller with a 3tb drive, it can only see 2096 gb, just over 2tb. That's a weakness in common with other similar controllers I've used - it's annoying.

The thing I hadn't known, is that you can use an ordinary SATA drive with a SAS interface. It just plugs straight in, even though the plug and socket look quite different. Nice!

So instead of using a fast (15k) SAS drive at 147 gb for the system drive with a 3tb drive for data, I'm using two 2tb drives, raided and striped for a bit more speed.

This is because I'm setting up a new server to be the backup of my main server. The existing backups of that server will be dowgraded to just data backups; the new server will be used as an instant-swap replacement for the main server if anything terrible should happen to it.


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