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Ian TaylorFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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P2000 SAN SAS - RAID5 or RAID50

Hi,

I have a P2000 SAN SAS with 12x 2Tb Disks in, it has two SAS 6Gb/s mgmt controllers which is going to be connected (1x SAS cable from each controller) to a single 2012 R2 Hyper-V DL380 G7 Server - I'm trying to think of the preferred option in configuring the RAID........

Disks RAID5
or
Disks RAID50
or
Should I split the disks up into 2 vdisk groups?
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rindi
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Whatever you do, don't use RAID 5. It is highly unreliable. I also wouldn't use RAID 50. Better would be RAID 6 or 60.
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Thanks - Just discovered that the HBA Card in this server is a HP SC08e 6Gb SAS HBA, I'm unable to locate the Windows Server 2012 R2 Drivers!
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Tom Cieslik
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Our default RAID array in standalone settings is RAID 6. Make sure there is at least 1GB of non-volatile cache RAM on the controller.

If you put two SAS HBAs in the server then do Storage Spaces. MPIO algorithm is Least Block Depth for Storage Spaces set up this way.
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Member_2_231077

I'd use RAID 6 as well.

With a single server I wouldn't use a P2000 though unless you already have it, cheaper to use a D2600 enclosure connected to a P812 RAID controller in the server. Probably more reliable too as the P2000 controllers tend to fail at the drop of a hat.

Driver for SC08e is at https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9200-8e#downloads
If you download the "HP" 2008 driver to your PC and extract rather than install you can see that it is the vanilla LSI driver inside the HP installer. You may need to tweak the .inf file though as the vendor ID is different and hasn't been included included in the 2012 version.
Thanks will take alook

We already a spare P2000 so want to put it too use
Make sure you delete the metadata from every disk and clear the config with "restore defaults factory" and "clear cache" before reprovisioning it, they can get really confused with stuff left behind from previous use.
Tried installing the 2008 driver, got so close but get the below:

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My Windows driver hacking is too old to help more, in NT4 and win2k days you would be able to install the driver from the Broadcom/LSI download by using the option to install the "wrong" driver with the "have disk" option.