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Raid1 mirror to 3 or 4 hard drives
I am looking to upgrade to a Poweredge T440 server. I live in Florida where hurricanes are frequent. I would like to be able to remove a mirrored auxiliary hard drive when ever a hurricane is coming. Ideally I would like Raid1 mirroring to 3-4 hard drives. This way I could remove the third mirror when storms are coming. So the question is this. Can windows server 2019 mirror 3-4 hard drives? I would like 3-4 C drives mirrored for programs AND 3-4 D drives mirrored for data.
DELL-Chris H
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December 16th, 2019 08:00
Rod1200,
Just so you know this isn't a suggested or even recommended way of backing up the data.With what you are saying here are a couple points.
A raid 1 would have to be an even amount of drives, like 2, 4, 6, etc. Then with removing the drives, with a 2 drive raid 1 you could take a single drive, but in cases with more than 2 drives, you would have take more drives. For example if you have a 4 drive raid 1 then you would have to take 2 of the drives to maintain the integrity of the data.
I would recommend getting data backups as that is a more stable, and safer way of backing up your information.
Hope this helps.
Rod1200
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December 16th, 2019 09:00
Chris, Thank you for the information. I have found very little information on Raid 1. My thinking about 4 drive Raid1 setup.... if one drive fails, just slip in a new drive and the data will be replicated to the new 4th drive...correct? In that case I could own 5 drives using only 4 as the raid. When a hurricane is coming could I then slip out one of the Raids and slip in the 5th drive to keep them even?
DELL-Chris H
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December 19th, 2019 04:00
You can do that, the information I was referring to was the active members in the Virtual Disk, not including the Hot Spares. SO you could do a 4 drive raid 1 with a 5th drive as a hotspare. As far as failures, if a drive in the raid 1 fails then the hot spare should rebuild in its place, with no hot spare installed then you would remove the failed and install the replacement. If the rebuild doesn't start automatically when the replacement is installed then you will assign the replacement as a hot spare and it will start its rebuilding.
Julius C
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July 7th, 2020 03:00
Chris, We are not asking for your opinion on whether it's a good idea or not. We are asking whether it is possible or not.
With large drives (e.g. ones that are 8Tb in size); the risk of rebuild failure (even for RAID1) is dramatically higher than a 1Tb drive rebuild; by having a RAID1 setup with 3 drives (or more) will make the use of large drives more attractive.
Everyone understands that RAID1 is not a means of backup but it is still an ordeal to have to restore from an off-site backup - so by having 3 drives in a RAID1 array it drastically mitigates the risk of rebuild failure and for the engineer to have to restore from an off-site backup.
Therefore, the question is does the DELL PERC RAID controller support RAID1 with 3 drives? YES or NO.
DELL-Marco B
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July 7th, 2020 05:00
Hello Julius,
there is a misunderstanding with RAID level hears.
As per definition at hardware PERC level RAID 1 is a Virtual disk with 2 hard disks.
If you ask if PERC can support RAID1 with 3 drives, the answer is no, because you can build a RAID1 (mirror) only with 2 drives.
But maybe you are referring to Windows Storage Spaces Direct fonctionality?
In this case, it is not directly supported by us, but i can give you a link to know more about it
https://dell.to/2Z4miGw
Have a good day
Marco