The 2944W was dead: swapping the 2940UW in, I was able to format my first drive.
Next, I gotta see if I can cram the HP NetRaid card into this Small Form Factor case (maybe if I rip out the floppy
).
Otherwise I confirmed that the 2940/2944 are not Raid capable (hardware), so I'm gonna focus on the NetRaid card now, which can do raid 0,1,3,5,10, 30 and more importantly: 50 (i.e. three channels each running at raid 5, setup as raid 0.).
These old controllers typically sell for $10 on EBay, and these 9.1 GB drives can be had for ~$5 ea. Using drives that old (manuf 1997 to 2000) brings up reliability issues, so I'm making sure that Raid 5 is up first.
The HP Netraid card is "hot spare" and "hot swap" capable. It also has SNMP capability, to monitor drives failures.
I'm probably going to use this for a small MySQL server, on the internal side of my home network (I've got a data repository software to test).
Oh yeah, I put the drives in a couple of drive cages, removed out of my old case. I'll mount a couple of fans on them.