You work as an IT support technician for a boss who believes you are really bright and can solve just about any problem he throws at you. He is concerned about downtime and potential data loss if the file server goes down. He is also concerned because the server hard drive is nearing full capacity. He wants you to figure out what hardware is needed to implement hardware RAID for fault tolerance for the operating system and the company data.

Performance is important because the company users do frequent updates to files, but his first priority is that the cost of this project should not be more than $1000.00 fully implemented.

You check the file servers configuration and discover that it has a single 500GB Western Digital 7200 rpm SATA hard drive with 256MB cache. The drive has Windows Server 2019 installed. BIOS/UEFI setup does not offer the option to configure embedded RAID. There are six empty bays in the computer case and 6 unused SATA connectors on the motherboard. You also discover the following empty expansion slots:

PCIeX8--1 available PCIe X4 --1 available PCIeX1 --3 available

Please consider the situation described above and decide how you will solve the problem. For your lab report:

1.) Write a paragraph that describes your intended solution and how your solution will solve the problem. (There could be more than one correct solution to the problem. Choose the one that you would recommend to your boss, and explain how your solution will solve the problem while staying under budget.)

2.) Write a paragraph describing (not just listing) the hardware you need need to buy to implement your solution and why each component type is necessary to your solution.

3.) Shop online for the hardware components that you need:

a. Find an ad for each component that you need to buy'

b. List each URL in your report.

i. Make sure that each URL goes directly to the ad for the component that you intend to purchase, and not to a shopping cart or page showing multiple components.

ii. You can make a list of the component name and URLs or put these in a chart as in the starter document posted below.

iii. Make sure that you include each component name, URL, number of that component required, cost per item, and total cost for that component either in your list or in a chart.

iv. Make sure that you include the total cost of the project at the end of the list or in the chart.

4. In your report, also answer each of the questions below in complete sentences and in your words:

a. What levels of RAID could be supported by equipment package you chose?

b. What server connections will you use to connect the equipment you chose?

c. Which RAID level(s) do you intend to implement and why? (If you answered this fully in #1 above, you can just answer with "see above").

d. Would other RAID level solutions be more or less expensive than the solution you chose? (Exact cost numbers aren't needed here, but based on your component costs, estimate whether other solutions would cost more or less, and explain why.

e. Answer the questions below and explain why you made these decisions.

i) Which disk(s) will hold the operating system?

ii) Which disk(s) will hold company data?