Poweredge 500 sc upgrade to RAID 1

[072055]

First please bear with me as I am FAR from a network admin. As a the owner of a small software company I wear many hats including janitor and net admin.
I have a small office network, the server (Poweredge 500 SC) has been plenty fast enough to do what we need. Yesterday the hard drive died. Fortunately we have backups of everything and it has been restored to an interim machine that will allow us to limp along. The question now is to upgrade the existing server to a RAID setup or just dump it and buy something newer with RAID installed.
Is it possible to install a RAID card with 2 new drives in this server? Are there MOBO/BIOS issues in terms of RAID support?
As I said, the server is fast enough as is for what we do, the goal is to get redundancy going so that the next time this happens we have a shot at jsut swapping in a new drive and continuing on where we left off.

 

[NickFerrar]

Not sure on the 500sc specs but you can just buy either an IDE or SCSI RAID card that plugs into one of the PCI slots. Get a half-decent one (adaptec etc.) will probably cost around £100.

You then have to decide if you want to mirror or RAID-5, mirroring will require two disks, RAID-5 at least 3. RAID-5 is quicker but it sounds like mirroring would be enough for you.

Personally I'd be tempted to by a new server with RAID + warranty included but if the 500sc is doing it's job then it would be hard to justify this.

 

[072055]

Nick:
Thank you for your response.
I was thinking Adaptec 1210SA card with a pair of Seagate 80GB SATA150 drives. Too low end?
All of it together less than $200 at

http://www.newegg.com

Best Regards

John

 

[NickFerrar]

Well given you don't mention performance problems with your current setup then those parts should be fine. Looking at the prices on the Adaptec SATA raid cards it's a pity there's nothing between the 1210 and 2410, it would be hard to justify going for the 2410 though unless disk performance was currently a problem, you'd also need to use something like WD 10k rpm Raptor's to get the most benefit from the higher spec card.

 

[072055]

Nick:
Thank you again for your response. The network is very small so performance has been acceptable. I will go ahead with the 1210 and seagate drives.

Thanks again.

Best Regards

John