Converting a PE2550 to SATA
Dell PowerEdge 2550 SATA Conversion
A couple weeks ago I was looking for a cheap rack-mount solution to hold some TB drives. I had a homebuilt 2U with on-board raid. That thing sucked. It had dropped the raid config TWICE and lost all the data both times. So now I looked into a more “reliable” solution. I wanted to use some dell hardware because I personally have never had any problem with dell server hardware. I had some old machines laying in the back so I pulled them out. One was a PE 2650 and the other was a PE 2550. I would have like to use the 2650 but after looking inside, I determined that I couldn’t use it. After looking in the 2550 I saw that there was some mollex connectors, and it had enough room (with the back plane pulled out) to run non-hotswap drives in there.
Parts Used in this Project:
- Soldering Iron
- Two extra Molex Connectors
- Dell 2550 server
- Adaptec 2610SA SATA RAID Controller
- Some Molex to SATA converters
- 5 SATA cables
I chose this server because:
- These are dirt cheap (I picked this up for $10)
- I had one
- It had Mollex connectors that I would need to hookup the SATA Hard drives.
This server only came with a SCSI configuration, but SATA drives are insanely cheap these days and for a homebuilt NAS box this would be perfect.
Firmware Solution
By default the the server comes with ESM (embedded server management) firmware installed. This basically runs the fan speeds and some hardware related management. This is great but it causes a serious problem. The ESM firmware checks to see if the Daughter Card is installed on the SCSI backplane. If it doesn’t detect it system halts and will not go into any boot up. So that kind of sucks. I had two approaches here. 1. I could try and keep the SCSI backplane with the Daughter Card in and try to stuff it somewhere else in the case or 2. try to modify the firmware to bypass the Daughter Card check. I tried the figure a way to finagle the backplane in the case while keeping the card plugged into it but it was a real touchy setup which I ended up just giving up on. My next test was trying all different versions of the firmware to see if there was a version that didn’t check for the Daughter Card. There was no such version. But I was reading on line about someone who had corrupted firmware and that was giving him the error of “Embedded Server Management firmware revision 0.0 Firmware is out of date please update” which got me thinking. If that guy had corrupted ESM firmware yet he could still run the machine, that was pretty much what I wanted to do. So after searching and finding nothing on running the server without ESM firmware I decided to try something risky. Remember this was only a $10 server and I had two. First I downloaded an older version of the ESM software from DELL’s website. I then made a bootable disc with that firmware on it and booted it up. When It asked if I wanted downgrade the firmware I said “yes” and it proceeded to erase the original firmware before installing the new one. After the dialogue changed to “writing firmware 00%” I killed the power. I then proceeded to reboot it. I disconnected the backplane and I ended up with this.
After that I was able to boot past the error and could configure the RAID controller and boot into an OS.
Taking out unneeded hardware
Now I needed to strip out unneeded hardware. I took out the SCSI controller, Backplane, and Daughtercard.
After those pieces are gone it should look like this.
Modifying the Connector
I tested with a volt meeter on the P2 connector the black, yellow, and red wires to make sure they were the same as the other molex connectors. They were so I cut the P2 connector off.
I then took the other two extra molex connectors I had and soldered them to the end of the wires.
Adding the RAID Card
I got an Adaptec 2160SA card on ebay. It was about $55. These came stock in some DELL and HP servers. It also has 6 SATA ports so it could run the 5 bays that the 2550 had. The card is a true hardware raid card not a fake raid one. The card is a PCI-X. There is a big limitation for this card however. It only can create volumes that are less than 2tb. So I ended up doing a RAID10 on this. With the 4 TB drives, and one 80gig drive for the OS. Here is a picture of the card.
Then I hooked the card up and plugged in some SATA cables. After that it is installed it’s just matter of plugging in the drives hooking them up and installing an OS.
