Hi, I am new to the forum today and would really appreciate some help. I have just purchased a used HP Z620 (dual E5-2690 with 96GB and Quadro K4000). The intention is to have a multiboot config with VMWare ESX 6.5 as the primary O/S (dual Windows 2016 Server Standard VM), also with Win 10 Pro and Linux Red Hat dedicated installs (max use of hardware for mining with dual GTX1070 and SLI).
I had planned to use this with 3 x 500GB SSD (RAID 5) and 3 x 3TB HDD (RAID 5). I have purchased all of the components and appreciate that I have made incorrect assumptions about how easy this would be.
I cannot see more that 3 disks when installing via the BIOS or when installing via Windows. When reading the detailed spec and blogs , I see the SATA is 2 x SATA 3 (6GBPS) and 4 x SATA 2 (3GBPS), also that RAID is software rather than hardware only supporting RAID 0,1 and 10. I have come to the conclusion that my options are;
(1) to reduce the config to dual SSD and dual HDD both with RAID 1 (but can still only see 3 x drives), or;
(2) add a seperate SATA Controller 8 Port SATA 3 and a seperate RAID Controller. I have found a SATA controller card that looks suitable (Syba SI-PEX40071), and I also see through that there are a couple of compatible RAID cards (LSI 9217-4i4e or LSI 9270-8i).
I am look for some guidance, is option 2 feasible and if so, how difficult is it to achieve. Would the SATA controller be compatible? do I need to disable the Mobo SATA Controller?, would I be able to control the new SATA and RAID controller independently of O/S?. Also I see that the compatible RAID controllers are SAS / SATA and I have no use for SAS, so is this appropriate or would a different RAID card be better?
I appreciate this is actually a lot of questions, but any help and guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Ian