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.
million projects 
December 16, 2007 at 3:50 am |
the exact answer i was looking for. thanks!
July 11, 2009 at 12:07 am |
Hi,
Do you have any details / instructions on how you did this. We have an SC440 with 2 x 250gb drives (raid) – would like to add 2 x 500gb drives.
Thanks
July 13, 2009 at 10:32 am |
Neil, it’s been a while and the server is a few miles away, so can’t open it to look, but remember using 5.25-to-3.5 drive bay adaptors. They are just metal brackets that take up the extra space between the hard disk and the larger 5.25 bay area normally used by your CD burner and/or floppy drive. I think the SC440 had 3 of those 5.25 bays, and I only needed 1.
Maybe something like this?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811993003
August 12, 2009 at 9:15 am |
Hi f4rrest,
I now have 4 sata hard drives installed in my DEll SC440, but when I reboot Windows Server 2003 only sees the original 2 drives. In the BIOS all drives are are set to on.
How did you make this work?
DJ