Adding second 3 drive raid 5 array

[Diaonic]

I'm looking at adding a second 3 drive raid 5 array to one of our production servers. I can't find any information about this particular controller card. I was wondering if it could support two raid arrays or if I would need a seperate card for the second array


PERC LD 0 PERCRAID SCSI Disk Device

 

[compcons]

The Dell PERC cards are usually named with a generation (2, 3, 4, etc). I have no idea what a LD is. It would help to get the actual dell Model of the card.

A PERC SCSI card will usuallty support 7 drives per channel. You can do separate RAID groups on a single channel. Of course, if you've gort two channels, use a RAID group on each one to maximize throughput.

EH

 

[Rubycon]

LD usually means logical disk.

Not sure about your particular host but I've expanded R5 arrays with LSi (which is the manufacturer of Dell's PERC - Power Edge Raid Controller).

There's a GUI manager that will allow expansion of an array once a new disk is added.

 

[dclive]

Exactly - install Open Manage 5.2, use Storage Manager to manage the array, and add disks to the appropriate volume, then use diskpart to expand the array.

 

[Diaonic]

It's a Perc 4 SC controller.

Right now i have a 3 drive array

I want to add 3 more drives but put them in a totally seperate array and keep the old one. Is this possible?

I have open manager installed I just don't know how to do it with this utility.

Thanks

 

[dclive]

I think you can probably use software tools (in Win2k3) to join the two, but I wouldn't recommend it. Dell can tell you in two minutes flat if you can do this using Dell tools, but I've been under the impression you cannot join two physically different arrays (on two different backplanes, I assume you're saying.)

If you have one array and devices on the same backplane, simply add the disks and join them to the volume, and then use diskpart to extend the array.