Due to hardware limitations on the Apple Xserves we have, we can’t use drives >2TB in size. “Bigfish” was set up to be RAID’d and, as such, has three existing HDDs installed.

We wanted to upgrade the HDD size and convert over to Linux (Ubuntu) so that we could utilize the Linux operating system for some of our bioinformatics programs that won’t run on OSX.

I installed Ubuntu 16.04LTS to the SSD boot drive (128GB) and installed three, 2TB HDDs. However, it cannot detect the HDDs due to the Apple hardware RAID controller! Searching the internet has revealed that this is a commonly encountered issue with RAID’d Apple Xserves and Linux installs.

I haven’t come across a means by which to remedy this. Will likely have to install an OS X version in order to make this computer usable. Although, that won’t limit us too terribly in regards to program usage. Most programs will run fine on OSX.