ProLiant DL100 - Mounting rails? Increasing disk size?

[Darrin Addams_1]

Hi,

Can anyone tell me which mounting rails I can use for a ProLiant DL100?

Also, I'm thinking of replacing the drives with some larger ones. Is there any limit to the size? Can I fit a set of 500GB ones? Would I need to increase the RAM at all?

Thanks :)

[Jon Paul]

Hi Phykell,
I would use the rails that came with the product. ;) Actually, every server ships with rails, if you do not have rails then I would question your supplier.
Also, by changing the harddrives, you can put yourself in an unsupported configuration.
Remember that the OS pre-installed is physically limited at 4GB.
Hope this helps.

[Darrin Addams_1]

Thanks for your reply :)

The unit (2nd user) was not supplied with rails.

I don't see a problem with replacing the drives which are hot-plug items anyway which are therefore very easy to swap out with higher capacity units (80GB isn't exactly large these days) and the unit is around 18 months old so only has the part swap-out warranty left.

The unit as installed currently has 9GB partitions for the OS (two of them) and around 196GB for the data partition. As far as I'm aware, I can configure the Adaptec controller to duplicate the OS partition sizes (9GB) and use the rest of the space for the data partition.

I'm not sure about the extra memory, personally I think it should be fine having looked at Task Manager's performance tab. I just wonder if there is any obvious advantage.

[Darrin Addams_1]

Hi,

Thanks to HP support I've got the part number for the rails in case anyone is interested.

356350-001

Can I assign myself points? ;)

[Mike of Missouri]

Phykell,
I am also looking to install larger drives in our DL 100. Have you found the correct drives ? I'd be most interested to hear if the upgrade works.

Mike

[Darrin Addams_1]

Sorry about the delay in replying but I've only just got around to upgrading the disks in my DL100.

The good news is that having chosen to replace the 80GB units with 500GB ones, the Quick Restore software built the new RAID arrays and restored the NAS just as it would with the smaller capacity drives except it now had a much more usable data partition! It reads around 1.33TB of free space now and seems to work just fine. The array verification is taking some time as you might expect though.

No doubt if I'd used 1TB drives, that would have worked too. The QuickRestore application certainly is a great piece of software!

One last thing - I chose to pay a little extra for the enterprise class "ES" Seagate drives for peace of mind. In total I think the 4 ES drives cost me £70 more than the equivalent desktop-grade units - well worth that little extra I think.

The Seagate model I chose was the ST3500630NS Barracuda which worked out around £70 each and besides being a lot quieter than the old Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9s, the Seagates seem to be noticeably quicker.