SovietBroski

That makes sense, thank you. To follow up on that, I guess what I really want to know is why the one and only SAS adapter around (as far as I could find anyway) is actively powered, huge, and over $700, when dozens of tiny options exist for SATA drives which are both passively powered and 1/100 the cost. I get that SAS is a monster compared to SATA but that gap just seems ridiculous.

when I said "passive" I was referring to passive vs active data transfer not passive/active power. whenever you have data moving from one source to another in its native form, that is passive data transfer. Active transfer, by contrast, is any situation where you have to put a process in the middle to convert data from one format to another. For example, adapting DIV to HDMI can be done passively because they are both digital signals. VGA on the other hand needs an active transfer setup to convert the analogue signal in to something that makes sense coming out of a digital interface like HDMI.

Yeah but couldn't you (theoretically at least) visualize the task of the controller?

sata (15 pin) > usb 3 (9 pin) can work passively so why not sas (29 pin) to USB c (24)? or USB A 3.0 for that matter. These things never have a 1:1 pin out so why does that matter?

I have some pretty neat SAS drives from an old project sitting around. I also have an rPi waiting to become a little NAS. I figured it would be pretty neat to smash these 2 things together because USB 3 and SAS are both full duplex. But for some reason the only thing I could find to make that connection is this monstrosity. Why does this need to be active data conversion? If they are both full duplex I feel like a passive pin converter should be able to do the trick just fine.

Are there any standard formfactors for things like motherboards and power supplies with this type of hardware or is it all unique to the manufacturer? I assume it isn't ATX or eATX and so on.

I plan on doing as many different things as I can (one at a time of course) because what I am mostly interested in is learning. I figured the best place to start would be to configure it as a simple file server for my local network. I plan on doing more advanced projects with networking and security as time goes on, but a lot of that will have to depend on money and upgrade restrictions.

The drive I used is an HDD (an old 80 gig VelociRaptor). I will update this post with a proper spec / parts list this evening. Awesome, thank you, and welcome!

Before I get into the thick of it, here is a disclaimer: I have no clue what I am doing in the realm of servers. I have a good bit of experience with consumer-class PC hardware, but that is it. In any case, I ended up being given a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge 2900 that was otherwise going to be scrapped. They kept all of the original drives for security reasons but everything else on it is stock and functional as far as I can tell. I grabbed a spare drive I had lying around and booted it with Ubuntu Server just to play around, see what I could see, test system functionality, etc. I knew going in that this was not bleeding-edge hardware and was not expecting a lot in terms of speed, but man oh man this thing is not fast. So now I am thinking about hardware upgrades. Nothing bank busting, I just want to bring it closer to modern standards. I am having a hard time finding information about component compatibility and form factors. There is no way it is all proprietary rite? If anyone could help me out with some tips on server hardware standards, form factors, compatibility, etc. I would really appreciate it! I look forward to the discussion; thank you all for your time!

This worked, Thank you all so much!

A friend of mine has suggested that it may be an issue of my ISO being configured to work with a UEFI system and not a BIOS system. Though, everything I have been able to find on the subject suggests that, in the case of booting in a BIOS system, the ISO should launch a "Compatibility Mode" which would enable it to work with a BIOS instead of a UEFI. I am not sure how relevant or accurate any of this information is, but I figured that it would be worth bringing up.

When I go into the BIOS and set the boot priority, USB is not an option. However, when I enter the "Boot Options" menu, I can choose to "Boot from front USB 2.0" Doing so causes the system to repeat the last three lines of text that I have posted above.

I made the bootable USB with a program called UNetbootin. I simply opened the program, selected the compressed ISO file, then selected the USB and ran the program. I am beginning to suspect that I have done something improperly here because I tried booting my home PC from the USB just to see if it would detect it. It did not.

if it helps, here is exactly what i am looking at. When the system tries to boot, it displays the following text: F2 = Setup F10 = Utility Mode F11 = Boot Menu F12 = PXE Boot Two 2.50 GHz Quad-core Processors, Bus Speed: 1333 MHz, L2 Cache: 2x6 MB System Memory Size: 8.0 GB, System Memory Speed 667 MHz Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet Boot Agent v4.4.4 Copyright © 2000-2008 Broadcom Corporation All rights reserved. Press Ctrl-S to Configure Device (MAC Address – xxxxxxxxxxxx) PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller BIOS Copyright © 2008 LSI Corporation Press <Ctrl><R> to Run Configuration Utility HA -0 (Bus 1 Dev 0) PERC 6/I Integrated FW package: 6.2.0-0013 1 Virtual Drive(s) found on the host adapter. 1 Virtual Drive(s) handled by BIOS Remote Access Configuration Utility 1.28 Copyright 2006 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved Baseboard Management Controller Revision 2.37 Primary Backplane Firmware Revision 1.05 IP Address: 0.0.0.0 Netmask: 0.0.0.0 Gateway: 0.0.0.0 Press <Ctrl-E> for Remote Access Setup within 5 sec. . . Broadcom UNDI PXE-2.1 v4.4.4 Copyright © 2000-2008 Broadcom Corporation Copyright © 1997-2000 Intel Corporation All rights reserved. Broadcom Base Code PXE-2.1 v1.1.0 Copyright © 2000-2008 Broadcom Corporation Copyright © 1997-2000 Intel Corporation CLIENT MAC ADDR: xx xx xx xx xx xx GUID: xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx PXE-E53: No boot filename received PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM. Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question but how do I open the terminal from within the boot sequence?