serial ata controller/drives and older proliants...?

[MooseFish]

I have several older [dual cpu: p3@550mhz, os:win2003server] proliant servers (1600, 1650, 1850,..) which I need to repurpose. Environment is very small office (~10 users).

I'd hate to dispose of these if i can somehow assign them a useful task... I was thinking about using a few as file servers, but we moved all our storage drives to 300gb Seagate st3300831as sata drives. (servers would still boot from their default scsi drives) Does anyone have experience with attempting to add a sata controller card and drives for use as a file server to old proliant servers? I was hesitant to purchase sata controllers since I dont know much about the servers' pci slot (2.0? 2.1?) compliancy, and whatever pci sata controller cards i can get my hands on...

 

[jfrantz]

I installed an SATA controller with a 300GB disk in a Proliant DL380 and it worked fine. I did the same as you're suggesting by booting from SCSI. The DL380 may be a year or two newer than your machines but I'd give it a try.

-Jeff