Anyone using old Dell RAID hardware?

[Lee]

I'm hoping to acquire a couple of 1999 vintage Dell PowerEdge 2300 servers, each with a 350 or 400 Mhz SLOT-1 CPU, 1gb of RAM a bootable CDROM drive and a handful of SCSI hard drives.  I also happen to have an otherwise unusable server laying around that has a pair of similar CPUs so I'm thinking of cannibalizing that and dropping an extra CPU into each of the Dells.  But the whole thing is kind of pointless if I can't access the HD arrays.

Does anyone know if the RAID related extensions will allow Core to recognize hardware of that vintage?

Of course, I'm not planning on actually -paying- anything for these servers, so its no big deal if I have to find out the hard way.   

Ya gotta love that old 20th century technology.

[gerald_clark]

What RAID extensions are you referring to?
If it is hardware RAID that presents itself as a standard SATA or PATA interface, you will need the BIOS or manufacturer's utilities to build the RAID which will appear as a normal drive.
If it needs special RAID drivers, you may find that no proprietary drivers exist for modern kernels.
If you can access the drives as just a bunch of disks, use md RAID.

[Lee]

I was thinking of raid-dm-KERNEL ... or do I not even need that?

You are right about the hardware presenting itself as a standard drive - SCSI, as are the individual drives.  And I think the setup utilities are all in ROM.

Sadly, my extra CPUs aren't the same type after all.

[Rich]

Hi Lee
According to Google, these machines were available with a RAID controller which may or may not prove to
be troublesome, but the motherboard has an integrated SCSI controller which does play nice with Linux.
Some individuals reported success after updating the BIOS on the RAID controller. Dell still has those
updates available online for download as well as manuals.