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What is the maximum storage size for an Xserve RAID module?
Years ago, an Xserve RAID was out of my price range. Now, I'm looking into getting one on eBay and playing around with it.
I have been making Mirrored RAIDS with Western Digital 3 TB My Books.
Can I put 3 TB drives in an Xserve RAID? It probably depends on the controller firmware or something.
Thanks for thinking about this.
Doc
iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
Short answer is no, you can't.
The XServe RAID has IDE drives mounted in a carrier. The maximum size drive shipped by Apple, supported under 1.5.1 firmware on the controllers is 750GB, though finding these on the used market is farily difficult. Aside from that, any IDE drive can be put in the carriers. If your unit has 'blank' slots, these are indeed just blank slots - you will need to get carriers / drive modules if you want disks in the slot if that makes sense.
People on the Internet, myself included, have experimented down the route of using IDE to SATA bridges in the carriers with 2.5" SATA drives which are more freely available. This way you can utilise cheap drives in your drive modules, or even SSDs (which offer little benefit I have found). Some users have had success with 1TB 2.5" SATA drives in this method, but not with anything bigger it seems. Myself, I've had suceess with 500GB SATA and 256GB SSD with this hacky method.
Hope that helps.
Short answer is no, you can't.
The XServe RAID has IDE drives mounted in a carrier. The maximum size drive shipped by Apple, supported under 1.5.1 firmware on the controllers is 750GB, though finding these on the used market is farily difficult. Aside from that, any IDE drive can be put in the carriers. If your unit has 'blank' slots, these are indeed just blank slots - you will need to get carriers / drive modules if you want disks in the slot if that makes sense.
People on the Internet, myself included, have experimented down the route of using IDE to SATA bridges in the carriers with 2.5" SATA drives which are more freely available. This way you can utilise cheap drives in your drive modules, or even SSDs (which offer little benefit I have found). Some users have had success with 1TB 2.5" SATA drives in this method, but not with anything bigger it seems. Myself, I've had suceess with 500GB SATA and 256GB SSD with this hacky method.
Hope that helps.
OK. Thank you. All this looks like a time sponge to me.
I think I'll keep stringing stand along drives for now.
I'm using SoftRaid because Apple's Disk Utility is soooo disappointing. I tried to concatenate two Western Digital 3 TB drives. Nope. Argument Error. Who knows what that means or how to fix it.
SoftRaid does not do concatenation (JBOD). Do you know of any Mac apps that will concatenate drives?
Thanks again for your comments.
Top of the day to you.
Doc
Maximum size for Xserve RAID modules
