Question

Raid 5 setup

Asked by: heydude

We have a dell 2900 server with a perc6i raid controller and 6, 1 terabyte hot plug drives. An outside company came in and configured the server for raid 5 using the raid controller and full disk capacity. Today I finally started to connect it, etc.. and noticed that in windows disk 0 is showing as 1799.99gb, disk 1 is showing as 1800gb, and disk 2 is showing as 1055gb.Disk 1 and 2 have not been configured in windows yet.  I'm figuring this is the disk capacity, minus the raid 5 data. My question is raid 5 option in windows is not available, if I ceate a spanned or a striped volume to combine them altgether the raid 5 still be available because it is configured through the controller? Shouldn't one of the drives have been configured through the raid controller as a hot spare? The setup just does not seem right to me.

Thank you

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Asked On
2009-10-28 at 20:46:25ID24853530
Tags

raid

,

5

,

server

,

dell

,

windows 2003

Topics

Windows 64-bit

,

Windows 2003 Server

,

Computer Hard Drives

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: ISoulPosted on 2009-10-28 at 23:38:43ID: 25691115

So the total capacity you should have is (6-1) x 1,000,000,000,000 bytes = ~4656GB

What you have is 1800GB + 1800GB + 1055GB =  4655GB, so close enough - you have your full capacity.

However, instead of one virtual disk using the entire 4656GB space, it looks like three virtual disks were created, two being 1800GB and the last one with the remaining 1055GB.

Look at this guide for more info: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/05/dell-tutorial-create-raid-using-perc-6i-integrated-bios-configuration-utility/

 

by: charlestassePosted on 2009-10-29 at 03:06:46ID: 25691992

What has been done is called Striping the Array, your consultant has taken all 6 drives and created multiple Raid 5 Volumes from them. Althought is is not a supported configuration and not a best pratice it will work. There is no way for you to reconfigure the arrays to removed on of the disks in order to make it a hot spare. The only option you have is to image, removed the array's, rebuild them in the configuration that you want and then restore your image.
Best pratice is to take 2 of your drives and create a raid 1 mirror for your OS and then use 3 for a Raid 5 setting your last drive as a global hot spare. The downside to this however is that you will loose 3 drives worth of available storage.

 

by: heydudePosted on 2009-10-29 at 05:36:15ID: 25692893

charlestasse,

Do you have a site or a link I could go to for the setup you are referring to?

 

by: heydudePosted on 2009-10-29 at 06:59:56ID: 25693698

I got it! It is a shame about the disk space, but I would rather have the fault tolerance. Will I be able to add more disks to the raid 5 or would I have to break the raid, add the disks, put the files that were on the raid back? I'm going with mirrored drives for the OS, raid 5 for the data, one hot spare.

 

by: gikkelPosted on 2009-10-29 at 08:20:58ID: 25694673

You can just add another disk to your array using OpenManage or through the perc configuration bios utility.  On a side note, it's likely the 3 virtual disks were created so they didn't exceed the 2tb ntfs-mbr limit...

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