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I want two Raids on a server, what do I need,

I have an IBM System x3500 server that at present has 3 IBM drives in a raid 5 array.   I am upgrading from 2003 Server standard R2 to 2008 Server Standard R2.    The drives are 73.4 Gb 10K SAS drives.   I want to add a second array with 3 1 TB 10K Western Digital SAS drives in a RAID 5.   Can I run two different arrays with these different size drives, and do I need a separate controller card to run this second array.

The first array with the with the smaller drives is going to run 3 servers (2 virtual).   The second array is going to be the Data drive.

Can this be done as I have asked above, and do I need the 2nd controller card, or anything else?
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Subhashish Laha
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You can run multiple RAID arrays on single RAID controller. Just make sure that for each RAID array - you use same size HDDs.
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BUt can one raid array run on the 3 73.4 Gb drives and the 2nd array run on 1 TB drives?  On that same controller?
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Subhashish Laha
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Each RAID Controller card has different supported configurations. Most controllers will allow you to configure at least two different arrays, althoguh some onboard controllers are limited to one. You should consult the maufacturer documentation for the controller installed to determine it's capabilities.

The ServeRAID M1015 controller, forexample, supports up to 16 arrays, so you should have no problem addding the additiona RAID 5 array as you want.

That said however, you may want to look in to creating a single larger 6 disk array instead of two 3 disk arrays. By having a larger array you'll lose less capacity to parity data, and increase performance of your VM's by writing data across a larger set of disks. If you're using HyperV for virtualization, you can then still configure Quota's to or create a logical partition at the OS level to help keep the data and VM disk space allocations as desired. (Although as previously mentioned, you'd want to ensure all the disks in the array are the same size.)
Great, thanks for the information and quick turnaround.