Second Drive cage

[J9F]

Hi, need some help/advice on expanding the storage on an old server.

I have an older Proliant ML330 G6 server running VMWARE esxi. It was supplied with 2 x 250Gb and 2 x 1Tb drives sitting in a drive cage. I think it's a hot swap one. The part number seems to 466509-001. The drives are connected to a RAID card. I can't tell what it is but it has 2 ports, 1 spare, there's a yellow sticker with the code 013233-001 and the BIOS reports an HP P410 so maybe that's it. I run a number of legacy vms on the server and it works perfectly fine. The problem is I'm running out of disk space. I have a couple of 4Gb drives that I could repurpose so was hoping to stick them in as a new RAID 1 array. That way everything stays the same but I will have some space to move into for backups and additional VMs. I was rather hoping to keep the costs down to the barest minimum as cash is a bit short at the moment,

I thought I just needed to get a new cage, stick some disks in it and away I go. I couldn't find a drive cage that wasn't going to cost me a ton of money so I bought a non-working donor machine from ebay for 30 quid. It has the same drive cage but had 4 SATA cables attached to the motherboard's SATA ports rather than a RAID card. I've managed to get the BIOS to see the drives in the new cage but as they're not connected to the RAID card they don't show up in the setup utility. I'm guessing that it isn't going to be viable running 2 disks attached to the motherboard and 4 attached to the RAID card.

So, the first question is am I being too optimistic here and I should really be using a different type of drive cage?Just because it seems to work doesn't necessarily mean it will continue to do so.

If it should be fine then is it just a case of getting another combined cable (493228-004) to connect the new cage to the RAID card and I'm off? As it stands a new cable may end up being the most expensive part of this exercise, those things are expensive. Are there any alternatives that might work?

Be grateful of any help that anyone can give, I am generally capable but I think some people on here will be vastl more knowledgeable than me,

Jon

[SydUmar_1 · Accepted solution]

Hello @J9F 
466509-001 appears to be a 4 bay hard drive backplane cage. If you wish to add additional drives, you will need an additional drive backplane cage + SAS cables + compatible drives and then connect to the existing 410 controller to the other port.  However, if you wish for these new drives to be a part of the same array they will need to be of the same drive capacity. Else, it would consider lowest sized drive as the size of the array. 

Not sure if its a typographical error (Is it a couple of 4GB or 4TB drives that you have?)

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[J9F]

Hi

Definitely a typo, the drives are 4Tb.

OK, that sounds like I just need to get the right cable and I'm in business. Not that fussed about having a separate array so I should be fine using the 2 new drives in a new raid 6 array. Brilliant news.

Thank you so much, much appreciated

Jon