RAID controller options for Poweredge 1800

Hello hopper71

I was looking at the Perc 6i as a possible solution, but according to Dell, it is not supported for the PE 1800. (Does that mean it will not work with the PE 1800, or that Dell will not offer support for that combination?)

It means that we have not validated it to work in the system. I don't know if it will work. The PERC 6/i is a PCIe device and you have a PCIe slot it will fit into. It may work, but I don't know for sure. The only SATA option validated to work in this system is the controller you have.

I'd like to create a RAID 5 array with 3 2TB Western Digital reds, and run MS Server 2008 R2 for my home network.

This will not be possible with any controller you install into the system. This is a limitation of the system board. In order to boot from a drive/array larger than 2TB you will need a system board that supports UEFI. We did not introduce systems that supported this capability until the 11th generation of servers, the 1800 is 8th generation.  There are ways around the 2TB limit, but that is a long discussion. I would suggest reading up on "2TB limit", "GPT", "Guid Partition Table", "UEFI", and "MBR" before you purchase a controller. Understanding this limitation with MBR BIOS may affect your decision on  controller.

Thanks

One note to Daniel's statement:

You could carve the raid 5 into 2 virtual disks where the first one is smaller than 2TB for the OS itself (e.g. 100GB) and the other virtual disk is the rest of the raid 5. In Windows this will show up as 2 harddrives (in disk management). One drawback is that if you split a raid set into 2 or more virtual disks, you can never expand if (by adding an additional drive); this is a limitation of the PERC raid controllers (has always applied and still seems to apply on the latest models).

Thank you Dev Mgr. I appreciate your reply.

I guess I should have clarified.

I am aware that I would need to allocate at least 100GB to the OS for boot purposes. The reason I'm wanting to configure this size array (3 2TB HDD in RAID5) is that I would not need to expand for many years to come.

My initial question remains: What RAID controllers are compatible with the PE 1800 to get around the size limitations associated with the Cerc 1.5/6channel SATA controller to support my desired configuration?

Thank you for all your help.

The PERC 5 or 6 is going to be your best bet ... "bet" since there is no "supported" controller for this server that meets your criteria.