5th internal drive on HP Microserver Gen8

[profet]

Does anyone know if I can add a 5th int drive to my gen8 - either an SSD or 2.5" HDD, for use with surveillance station?

 

I know it can be done physically, but will xpenology see it? Do I need to change anything in the HP bios?

 

I'm on DS3615xs 7.1.0 at the moment. Will be switching to DS3622xs+ and 7.1.1 soon.

 

 

[profet]

Well I'm just going to go ahead and answer my own question...

 

Yes, you can put a 5th drive in there. I have an SSD connected with an adaptor to the floppy power cable, and a spare sata cable to the motherboard.

 

Showed up in Xpenology right away once I booted - nothing needed to be changed in BIOS or in the loader.

 

Next step is to see if I can replace the SSD with a full size HDD...

[WiteWulf]

FYI, that additional SATA port only runs at 3Gb/s. It's a weird SATA controller, drivebays 1 and 2 run at 6Gb/s, 3, 4 and 5 (the optical disc drive, ODD) all run at 3Gb/s.

 

If you want more/faster storage consider adding a PCIe NVMe or SATA adapter. There's a pretty good discussion of the options over here:

 

[profet]

That's good info - thanks!

 

I'll be using that fifth drive for a couple of CCTV cams only - so speed won't be an issue. That'll free up the fourth front bay to expand my main storage pool...

 

Honestly, I can't believe how long I've had that Gen8 - and I still don't see any reason to upgrade. Fantastic piece of hardware. I finally set up the ILO interface today, in preparation for moving to a newer loader and DSM version - which makes it even more amazing...