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Poweredge 2900 with 3 storage controllers
I have a Poweredge 2900 III that I'm turning into a home storage system. Will be running Server 2012 with StableBit DrivePool (this is important).
8 drive SAS/SATA bay
2 drive SAS/SATA Flexbay
I have 3 storage controllers available for use:
PERC 5/i Integrated
SAS 6/iR
SAS 5/E
For the OS I want to connect the flexbay to the PERC 5/i for Raid 1. I want the SAS 6/iR to controlled the 8 drive bay for storage. The SAS 5/E will be for the 2 MD1000 enclosures I also have.
The 2900 has the integrated controller slot, 1 8x slot and 1 4x slot. Either the SAS 6/iR and PERC 5/E can go into the integrated slot (just need to remove the bracket from the 6/iR to make it "integrated" and add the bracket to the PERC 5/I to make it a regular card). Which card should go where for best performance? I feel that it should be this:
6/iR in integrated slot
5/E in 8x slot
5/I in 4x slot
Since the 5/I will only be controlling 2 drives, 4x should be more than enough bandwidth. The 5/E will be controlling up to 30 drives in jbod, so it will need the 8x. The 6/iR will be controlling 8 drives and I have to assume the integrated slot is basically an 8x slot.
Is this feasible?
Admin4U
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March 18th, 2016 01:00
The 2900 will only support using 1 internal storage card, and you can only use either the Perc 5i or the SAS 6IR. You will want to use the Perc 5I for the internal storage as it has a dedicated DIMM cache and the SAS 6ir does not.. You can also use the SAS 5e for external storage.
Alexsha
8 Posts
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March 18th, 2016 07:00
My 2900 boots just fine with all 3 cards. They are recognized by the bios and Windows 2012. The perc 5/I doesn't support jbod, so I only want to use it for the 2 drive raid for the OS.
Is there a controller that supports hardware raid 1 and jbod?
theflash1932
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March 18th, 2016 11:00
The SAS 6/iR supports RAID (0 and 1) and non-RAID, but it is a pretty horrible card if you are wanting any type of performance.
Alexsha
8 Posts
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March 18th, 2016 11:00
Which is why I want to keep the Perc 5/i for the OS drives. If Dell had a controller that could do hardware RAID as well as actual JBOD (not a bunch of single RAID0 disks), I would use that.