I have a used server that I just bought…it has 3 hot swap hard drives in it…. I plug it in, add mouse and monitor to see what's on it…I go to "my computer"….I only see one hard drive… is this a server thing? Please advise how to get to the other hard drives. It runs on Windows XP

What manufacturer and model is the server?

The three drives may be configured as a single volume with RAID5. If it has a hardware based RAID controller, then with three drives, you could have RAID0, RAID1 and RAID5 available to you.

For the sake of argument, lets assume that you have three 100 GB disks:

RAID0 (300 GB volume) is a striped volume with no redundancy. All three disks would be combined into a single large volume.

RAID1 (100GB volume) is a mirrored volume with two drives. Two disk are continuously duplicated. The third disk could be a global hot spare or a non-RAID volume.

RAID5 (200 GB volume) is a striped volume with parity. Each disk holds enough information to allow for one of the three disks to fail without loss of data.

It's made by "Silicon Mechanics"

They are each 160GB each.

1) How do I figure out how they are configured?

2) How can I reconfigure them to be normal everyday harddrives... 3 different/unique drive letters in "my computer"

3) So with RAID0 it would ready like one 480 GB drive (drive letter)?

4) RAID1 is for back up... one drive would just be a continual back up of the other? How would I do which one is which? I guess it doesn't matter.

5) I don't understand RAID5. Is this another backup plan? If both drives one and two are almost to capacity, how does the 3rd know which one to be backing up?

Xpeserx, what use do you intend to put this "server" to as you appear to be slightly confused as to what a servers function is ?

I expect it to be a really fast computer :)

That doesn't really answer my question, but servers are not really designed to be fast, as such.
Certainly not fast as in a high spec'd desktop.

You really should have a read through this: Server (computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Yeah, I know it's not it's intended use... but I came across one used and it has a lot more memory and a faster CPU than the one I currently have... but cheaper than a well spec'd desk top.

The only issue I have it the hard drives... which it seems now may have something to do with the RAID set up. Hopefully Chuckhole can give me some confirmations on the above. I'm going to reboot it over the holiday and see if RAID shows up in the booting process and which one. I don't know what to do to set/adjust/edit the RAID set ups once I find out what it is.

I don't mind the mirror set up for two drives, but I'd like the 3rd to be just a normal, extra hard drive. May I'll need to reformat the third one?

Ok, the boot up says "1x2 Raid 1"

So I guess that means HDs 1 and 2 are mirrored.

What can I do about #3, is there a way to get in there and change the RAID settings? I want #3 to be a plain ole hard drive.