Compaq ML530 Set-up

[edsuk1]

Hi All.

Have purchased a Compaq ML530, with 2 x Xeon P3, 3 x PSU's and 6 x SCSI disks (2 x 9.1gig, 2 x 18.2 gig, 2 x 36.4 gig) & a 20/40 DLT.

This mights sound like a daft question, I am aware that the disks are hot swap, along with the fans etc, but how do I know if the drives have raid and how can I check if I load data onto these drives.

Secondly, can I remove the smaller drives and install say 36gig or 72gig in all bays, by taking them out individually and allowing them to re-build?

I have built a couple of smaller mirrored server with Win2k and have had no probs, but this one has got me.

Perhaps, someone could advise whether installing the ML530 would be a good file/database server for around 8-10 clients, running Win2k Active Directory?

Look forward to your replies - thanks Mark.

 

[xsquid]

I don't think that I am the person to answer all of your questions, but we have several of these on our internal network and also a couple on our ISP network and I can tell you our experience with them.

All of ours are the dual 1ghz machines with Smartarray 5302 or 5304 controllers with at least 64meg cache. We stuff them with 4 gig ram (cheap now) and off we go. I think the last one we bought, we stuffed with all of this for about $500.

We use one of them as our Exchange 2003 server on a network with about 30 users. We have another on that runs Server 2003 as our main webserver. 2 others with Fedora Core 4, 1 for Tftp (voip) and the other is for outbound mail filtering.

I have a couple of dual 3 gig DL360's for other things, but the 530's are the box I am buying for anything not absolutely requiring much more horsepower. Lots of bang for the buck, easily repairable, very modular, parts are cheap, etc.

As far as the drive question, you can find other threads on expanding the arrays, etc. But in a nutshell, my understanding is that your smallest drive is your limit and just replacing that drive with one of larger capacity won't help you. Our experience is with the 5300 controllers, so if you have something different, this may not apply.
For example, you might set the 2 18's up as mirrors, install the OS on there, and set the 36's up as another drive, maybe get another two or 3 and run raid 5 on them with an online spare, so if one fails it will rebuild automatically.

Anyway, my .002. Good luck
Jerry

 

[edsuk1]

Hi Jerry.

Thanks for you reply.

That gives me some thoughts on how I might deploy these units within our business.

Are you saying that the drives automatically Raid, as I am unable to locate any facility to interogate the drives or set-up raid within the box?

Cheers

 

[newBPhoneGuy]

install hp array config utility to view the raid sets it wont tell you whcich disks are where but you can figure it out by looking at the sizes. and if you pull out a small drive on a mirror and put in a larger one the new larger drive will degrade to what ever the smallest drive is in the raid set. if you have extra slots i would plug in the new larger drives creat the array you want creat the logical drive and if theres data on the old raid set you want you can just copy it over....this is all done using the hp array config utility..........hopw im not to late