Question

RAID 50 broken into two partitions by default?

Asked by: ipswitch

I have a Dell Poweredge 2950 with 6 1TB SATA drives.  It has a perc 5/i Raid controller.  I configured RAID-50 with the 6 drives and initialized them.  

When I go to install Server 2008, however, the volume is broken out into a 2048MB partition, and a 1676MB partition.  How come this happened, is there a disk size limitation I have reached?  This is my first foray into RAID 50....

Thanks.

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Asked On
2009-10-22 at 07:07:59ID24834535
Tags

Poweredge 2950

Topics

Computer Hard Drives

,

Computer Servers

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Answers

 

by: noxchoPosted on 2009-10-22 at 09:18:45ID: 25635926

Your drive is partitioned in MBR style that has limit of 2048GB. There is another style that supports bigger formatting GUID partitioning table - GPT. But the problem is that Windows does not install on GPT volumes like MacOS.
Now you need to take backup of your system (no backup if you  can reinstall it) - take out one 1TB drive from RAID and create two drive configuration.
1 will be your RAID of 5 drives you keep for storage room purposes.
2 (standalone drive) will be your system drive where you install Windows to or restore it from backup to.

 

by: dlethePosted on 2009-10-22 at 09:19:32ID: 25635938

Yes you hit the ceiling.  First, Win2K3 pre-SP1 had a 2TB limit on the largest lun the O/S could handle.  Win2K8 has no such limit.

the downside is that the older PERC controllers also have a 2TB limit.    THere *MAY* be a firmware update depending on the specific part number you have.  Check the dell support site.  Note, if such an upgrade exists, then it is likely that upgrading firmware will destroy all your data, so be sure to read the release notes and do a full backup before attempting to reconfigure.

 

by: noxchoPosted on 2009-10-22 at 09:28:35ID: 25636042

Windows 2008 supports 2TB+ as data drive only. Not as system drive.
Only Itanium versions of Windows can install on GPT partitions.

 

by: ipswitchPosted on 2009-10-23 at 12:45:50ID: 25647782

OK, so I've rebuilt the server with 2 RAID 5 arrays (3 1TB disks in each).  I created a 60Gb C: drive and installed 2008 standard on it.  I converted disk0 and disk1 to dynamic disks, and with the unallocated space remaining on disk0 I created a spanned volume using the entire disk1 unallocated space.  

I formatted and now have a 3.57TB D: drive.  This is good, but now I have a question about redundancy and failover.  Since I am using dynamic disks with spanned volume and I not protected against disk failure?  Does the fact that I have hardware RAID still protect me from disk failure, or if one disk in either array goes bad, will I lose all my data?

 

by: noxchoPosted on 2009-10-23 at 12:48:00ID: 25647813

there is no 100% protection. But harware RAID5 protects you the same way like software RAID does.
Additionally you need to use backup software so to take weekly or nightly backups. Depends of the value of data on the RAIDs.

 

by: ipswitchPosted on 2009-10-23 at 13:03:08ID: 25647995

I guess my question is this.  Is creating a spanned volume negating hardware raid?  I've never used spanned volumes and my concern is will my level of fault tolerance be any different with using spanned volumes over traditional basic disks with simple volumes?

 

by: noxchoPosted on 2009-10-23 at 13:20:03ID: 25648181

No. It will not be.
The only inconvenience is that you can do nothing with spanned volumes. No resize or conversion of dynamic volumes to basic.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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