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743
Drive and RAID upgrade PE R520
Hello,
I'm looking to add more storage to our VMWare environment by replacing all eight drives in one of our PowerEdge R520s. I know it has either the H710 or H310 controller, I can't immediately check as we're working from home currently. We're planning on going with RAID 6 if it's the H710 and RAID 5 if it's the H310 as it doesn't support 6. I would like to go with eight 4TB drives if possible.
A couple questions I have:
1. What is the largest storage capacity the R520 can handle? It's spec page says 24TB but I've also seen 32 and 64TB thrown around.
2. Currently the eight drives are split into three sections, but we would prefer them to be in one RAID and subsequently one datastore for ease of management and to maximise storage capacity. The manual says this though:
- up to eight 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch hot-swappable hard drives
- up to four 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch hot-swappable hard drives for software RAID
Does this mean that we would need to make two RAIDs with four drives each?
Thanks!
Dell-DylanJ
2.9K Posts
1
May 14th, 2020 07:00
Good morning,
1. There's not a published max drive size, that I've seen. I've also not encountered a drive that wouldn't work because of it's capacity. The older PERCs had limitations, but they had that 2TB limitation because of 32 bit addressing. That's not to say that any drive will work, just that I don't have any reason to believe that drive size will end up being a concern factor.
2. You can mix the drives into a single volume. Unrelated - I had a 24 SSD RAID 0 in an R720, just because I was being goofy. It worked fine, so I would expect no issues with an 8 drive configurations.
Based on your storage goal, and the config you want to use, I think it'll be pretty straight forward.