asked on 5/14/2011

Convert a Dell 4550 or 8250 to a Win home Server

I am admittedly somewhat of a novice but wish to convert one of my older Dell computers to a WHS machine. I have a choice of using a Dell 4550 or a Dell 8250. I have purchased two Seagate Barracuda SATA XT 2 TB hard Drives (model 9GV168-301). I have purchased a SATA II NCQ Host controller card that supports 3.0 GBPS and NCQ, 32 bit @33MHZ, PCI rev 2.2 compliant with buss metering modes. I have all the cables etc.needed. My first question is; am I on the right track so far? If yes great, if not what to fix. Next what primary hard drive would you recommend, size speed. brand etc., as I will replace the original hard drive to something bigger? I also have purchased Microsoft Win home Server pwr pk 3 win 32, OEM System Builder Pack. I can install any amount of memory as needed as I have spare 512 and 1 GB spare mem. modules for each machine. Any and all suggestions are appreciated for choosing either dell machine(4550 or 8250) or a primary hard drive recommendation, software install or watch outs, partitioning etc. , hardware install sequence, Bios settings etc. Thanks alwayslrnin

Microsoft Legacy OS Components Server Hardware

Last Comment

Wil Samson

5/19/2011

SOLUTION

arnold

5/14/2011

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IanTh

5/14/2011

what sata controller did you get most of them are rubbish

Wil Samson

5/14/2011

ASKER

The SATA Controller is by SYBA, The specs are as follows;
Syba SD-SATA2-4IR PCI SATA II 4x Internal Ports RAID Controller with SIL3124 Chipset.
PCI Serial ATA (SATA2) 4 Channel Controller Card with RAID function, SIL3124 Chipset
Features 4x Internal SATA2 Ports
PCI-X 32-Bit 66MHz Interface

Specification General
Silicon Image SIL3124 Serial ATA (SATA2) host controller chipset
Backward compatible to PCI specification
Support PCI bus-master access
Compliant with Serial ATA II specification, the extension of SATA 1.0a Revision 1.1
Compliant with Gen2i, Gen2m SATA II Electrical specification Revision 1.0
Backward compatible to SATA 1.0 specification
Support 4 independent SATA ports with data transfer rate at 3.0Gb/s
256 Byte FIFO Per Port for Fast Read/Write Operation
Support Native Command Queue (NCQ), Port Multiplier, First Party DMA
Support Plug & Play and Hot Plug
RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 JBOD function supported
Approval
System Requirement Support Windows 98SE/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Server 2003/XP 64-bit/Vista Linux & Netware
Included
SATA2 Controller Card, CD Driver, Manual.
Model Part number Chip set
SD-SATA2-4IR SIL3124

i reviewed the Amazon website for comments, this was one of the better ones. If it's a wrong choice, what do you suggest?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Gary Case

5/14/2011

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Wil Samson

5/19/2011

ASKER

Thanks to each of you for your suggestions. alwaylrnin