Dell PE2600

[Hans Manhave]

Lightning struck the utility pole which killed our transformer, phone system, several workstation, and many more things.

My DELL PowerEdge 2600 machine is dead.  I have no spare parts to figure out what exactly is dead.  One power supply appears to be good.  Maybe only the motherboard is dead and one of the two power supplies.

I know my tape backup unit and controller still appear to work because we transferred that to another machine.  Currently downloading the tape software.

Does anyone know if those Dell Perc/4 RAID controllers can be moved to a regular machine or what one is supposed to do about that RAID to see if will still function?  I would love to just move it to a new machine instead of rebuilding without it.

How does one go about moving the RAID 5 system to stick in other hardware?

Thanks.

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

I might have a couple PE 2600s - I'd have to check.

[Hans Manhave]

I may be willing to buy one and pay for the overnight shipping!

I was googling to see how much they go for now. 

[Hans Manhave]

Anyone know if one can take a RAID5 drive (just one) and plug it into a RAID controller to see if the drive will spin up?  I don't want to wreck the RAIDing, but I would like to know if the drive still spins.  That way I can possibly obtain another controller (wherever one might be).

It appears that the Dell PE2600 uses a QLogic chip for its Perc/4

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

looks like I have 2300 and 2400 series

[Jeff Golas]

The perc cards could probably be put into a regular workstation, just check the PCI bus needs to see if there's anything special. I'd leave EVERYTHING setup exactly the way it was. If the 2600 had the drives in a backplane, I would see about powering the backplane back up (having the 2600 side-by-side with the workstation).

The only problem is the OS will not be setup for the workstation so it might actually be easier to just do a restore or get another 2600. If anything instead of shipping the whole case you could just ship the guts (mobo, power supplies, etc)

If Rick doesn't have exactly what you need, let me know as I have a local buddy with a warehouse full of of that sort of stuff.

To answer your question, you should have no problem powering up the drives as long as the actual SCSI cards aren't connected. You don't want to have a drive under the wrong ID and have the card start rebuilding. Label each drive as to where it was exactly in the server before you yank em out - you'll need to put them back in the same order if you get a replacement box. If you do get a replacement box just move the actual perc card over, especially if its battery backed. It'll retain all the raid info.

On the plus side, I got some seriously awesome lightning pics last night :-) Sorry to hear about your trouble though Hans I hope you get it back up quickly.

[Hans Manhave]

Mobo shot, PS shot, probably more stuff bad too.  Perc4/i part of mobo.

Wondering if a PowerEdge T610 would do, wondering what speed processors to get.  What level RAID.

Had a RAID5, dual Xeon 3.0GHz.

Appears better to have smaller HD's at higher speed.  Probably SCSI again.  Never had a server without SCSI.

Comments?  Suggestions?

Phone company is replacing all their incoming T1 stuff.  Lots of stuff got fried.
TAM appears fine. 

[Bob]

We just bought and deployed a T610.  Absolutely love it!   I can email you the specs..   

[Jeff Golas]

My newest server is an R710 and runs Vmware Esxi off an SD card mounted inside it :-) Dual quad-core processors and 12 gigs of ram and so far I'm running 4-5 Virtual machines under it and the thing still looks like its practically idling.

I'm a big pusher on hard drive throughput anymore - 15krpm SAS drives and you'll need a seat belt use it :-)

SAS is the new scsi - "serially attached scsi". Basically I think it uses multiple sata channels for a single drive.