Spent a bit of the Easter weekend on tinkering with my PowerEdge 2650 again. It's been laying dormant in the garage for a long while now, simply because I kind of bought it on a whim and then started realizing tinkering with it in the house means everyone gets to enjoy the sounds of jet engines 🤣 It's equiped with two Prestonia 2.8GHz Hyperthreading NetBurst Xeons, and two gigs of memory, upgradable to twelve. I might at some point invest in 3.2GHz/533MHz Gallatins, which this system supports, for that extra clockspeed and L3 cache.
Fired it up, the two 72GB Ulta320 SCSI drives it was equiped with still fire up fine despite being stored in the cold garage during winter. Might make it a thing to pull those out during the cold months. I only had two caddies, the rest were blanks, but I still wanted to add two more Fujitsu 18GB Ultra160 drives without spending money on caddies (they are still just pieces of metal + plastic, no electronics involved). So I took two of the blanks, and kinda eyeballed how the hard drive should be placed in it, and secured it with some ductape 🤣
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Ended up not going in far enough to properly plug into the connectors on the backplane, so I took the top of the server off, and carefully pushed the drives in by pushing a flathead screwdriver against the side of one of the visible screws on the drives. Seems like it'll stay in nicely, but the ductape probably still has enough leverage that I can pull the drives out again should the time come.
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Made a RAID 0 of the two 72GB drives (livin' on the edge!), installed Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4 on it, and then messed around with pre VT-x virtualization. Unfortunately, my plan of assigning the physical 18GB drives to VMs failed, as I couldn't find a way to set the drives offline. 2000's Disk Management doesn't have an option for it, neither did the DiskPart Resource Kit I installed, and VMWare just starts erroring out as I assume it's trying to set the disk offline but can't. Might be a NT 5.0 thing? Anyways, it's good to give this neglected beast a spin again, I might try obtaining a cheap rack for it, or building something that functions as one for it 🤣
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