We have two PE-2650's with the SCSI-SCA drives. They currently have Red Hat Enterprise installed. These two boxes have been retired from active use and I would like to re-purpose them.
Problem one is the drives, SCSI-SCA drives are expensive and SATA/SAS drives are just as fast and both cheaper and higher capacity. Is there still a backplane available for the 2650 and SATA/SAS drives? What else would be needed for this conversion other than a controller card to connect to the SATA/SAS backplane?
Problem two is the OS. We have two available, legal, licenses for WinXP that would be perfectly adequate for what we are planning for these two systems. Are there any known driver issues I should be aware of?
Other than the hard drives really, the two systems still have plenty of horsepower for what we have intended for them. One to be a mini file server and the other running our internal antivirus server.