Install 4 disks on a Dell sc440 – Yes it can be done

Bought a Dell PowerEdge sc440 server – bottom of the line but sufficient to host Exchange for a small office. Opened the case and noticed only 2 bays for hard drives, but the motherboard has 4 SATA connectors. What to do? Go into the BIOS and you see that it is possible to enable all 4 Disks, so you just need somewhere to mount them in the tower.

Time to get creative.

First of all, you don’t need a floppy, so if you ordered one with your server, take it out. You can fit a hard drive in there with a $10 adaptor.

Then, you also have room for a second optical drive… unless of course you bought the tape backup. Get a 5.25 to 3.5 inch adaptor to convert that extra optical bay.

Then just pick up a couple of SATA cables and power supply adaptor dongles and you’re good to go. I’ll post pics shortly.

Maybe you’re like me

I’ve got a lot of varied interests: business ideas, computing, programming, network security, digital photography, woodworking, prototyping…

And the list keeps growing. So, why add “putting up a blog” to the list, when I should be making progress on one of these other areas of interest?

I’ve always felt that blogging is more for those who can’t be bothered to code their own websites, and I enjoy the code. In fact, I enjoy the code too much: HTML, CSS, .NET, Coldfusion, AJAX. Playing with API’s… e-commerce systems. It’s all very easy to get tied up with the details.

Doing it all yourself can really slow you down.

So I’ve decided to stop reinventing the wheel. I’m utilizing someone else’s platform to blog, without even customizing it. It’s painful but good.

Hello world!

Yay! I love “hello world” anything.