Sunday, April 24, 2016

hard drive - 80 pin SCSI Raid Controller to SATA SSD's on IBM e336



I have an Old IBM e336 1U Sever. Currently the only Hard drive in the system is a Ultra160 SCSI drive. This drive is old and making some noises indicating that its life is going to end soon. Though my data is backed up I need something to run the OS off of. With the hard Drive installed I have booted off of a USB key no problem. When I remove the Hardrive I can no longer boot from USB or DVD. On the board there are 2 Sata ports. Labeled Left and Right, But neither of these seem to detect any devices attached to them and in the BIOS it seems to only have 2 hard drive locations which I can only assume are the 2 SCSI Drive bays.




I seem to have run out of Options as 80pin SCSI to Sata seems to be impossible.
And once the SCSI drive is dead I do not know if I will be able to boot from USB.

1. Can Anyone recommend a way to use a modern drive with a SCSI controller?




  1. I have looked at PCI SSD's But have been told you cannot use these as boot devices either?


  2. Anyone with experience with the IBM e336 know how to Enable the SATA ports?






The xSeries 306 server also has a 1U form factor, but supports uniprocessor operations and only fixed Ultra320 SCSI or SATA HDDs



Answer



I would dump the server. It's 10+ years old. So your options for newer disks are extremely limited. SATA was introduced on server chipsets around the time this server was released. I wouldn't put much hope in using those ports.



Your best option is to add another period-correct SCSI drive. They're readily available on eBay.


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