Fcousin,

If you are asking if there is a path to take to without recreating the Virtual Disks, there is not. As you can't roll a Raid 5 to a Raid 0, as you can see here.  The supported path to take would be to backup all the data, delete and then recreate the Virtual Disks as you desire, reinstall the OS, restore the data. 

Also, you had stated "(learned that the PERC6i was limited to 2TB physical drives)" which is indeed true, but it also has a 2TB virtual disk limitation as well. To exceed that limitation you would want use an H700 raid controller (part # 1THG8), instead of the Perc 6/i.

Let me know if this helps..

Hi Chris,

Thanks a lot. This is really helpful.

So if I want to setup a RAID 5 array on a PERC6i controller, with the 2TB virtual disk limit and physical disk limit, the only way to accomplish this would be to not exceed 500 GB per disk on a 4 disks configuration or 600 Gb on a 3 disks configuration.
Is that correct?

So in my case, I would have to delete all virtual drives as you mentioned and recreate from scratch.
I have a couple of questions:

• Can you have two RAID 5 virtual disks on the same controller/server?
• Once my arrays are redefined, can I use a bare-metal backup to restore the original system (that I had on my current virtual disk 0), including the OS and are there any restrictions (i.e. if the backup was taken from a RAID 5 layout, does it have to be restored on a RAID 5 layout type of constraint)?

Thanks a lot for your help,
Fred

Hello fcousin,

The physical disk capacity limit is more a limit of addressable space. The issue you'd run into is having leftover space that is basically wasted.

You can have multiple virtual disks handled by 1 controller. As for the back-up question, that's somewhat out of our wheelhouse. I can try to answer your question, but I may need more information. Once you create your new RAID container (of whatever configuration) it's obviously ready to be written to, but the issue you may run into is that the bare metal backups are, from what I've seen, block level backups. Changing the drive configuration would change how the blocks are distributed, and I think there's a potential to run into issues there. It would take more effort, but a file level backup would not run into the same issue, because by the time you're ready to restore from it, you have a file system to load the data into.

My recommendation would be to obtain an H700 controller, if you're open to it. I had an R710 as a personal server for some time, and it also came with a PERC 6i. I ordered an H700 and got a significant quality of life improvement for the system, and I think I paid around $20 to $30 for the controller. In my opinion, this is a situation where a hardware upgrade is very worthwhile.

Thanks a lot for all the information.
This was really helpful.
Regards,
Fred