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Upgrade RAID capacity - CERC SATA vs SCSI Ultra320
Hi all, I'm looking to increase the capacity on a 1800PE sever currently running two 160GB SCSI drives in a simple mirror. I've read some posts on the best procedures for doing this - i.e. restoring an image backup to a newly-created array. But I'm also wondering whether the client would be nearly as well served by going with a pair (or more) of SATA drives, which look to be quite a bit cheaper and maybe nearly as fast as the ULTRA320 drives in there now. This might also have the advantage of being able to copy the old drives straight across to the new ones, or make a "live" backup right onto them.
Does anyone have any opinions on the relative merits of these two options or the procedure to follow? Are they going to be too limited by the SATA 1 controller to the use of newer drives comparable to SCSI U320?
TIA!
Dev Mgr
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December 4th, 2009 08:00
If your 1800 has a hotswap backplane (for those SCSI drives), you can't change to SATA drives without some serious work (and possibly some hardware). If you have a cabled disk setup, you would need a SATA or SAS raid controller (e.g. SAS5iR or PERC5i) and the right cable (8484 to 4 x SATA I think) and then could create a raid 1 with SATA drives.
Going from 10k or 15k SCSI drives to 7200rpm SATA drives may or may not be noticable. It will depend on how much IO the system is currently doing (not just in MB/s, but also in IOPS).
paulbrainard
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December 9th, 2009 17:00
Thanks for the feedback! It's not a hotswap setup. There is a CERC 1.5 6-channel SATA RAID controller in it as well as the on-board controller (at least according to the Device Manager.)
These guys just need to get some more capacity - they're literally running out of room for the OS - at the least possible cost, considering both hardware and my time to do the upgrade. I like the idea of a parallel SATA RAID array & making a "live" backup to it - seems like it might be quicker than creating a new SCSI array and restoring a backup. Unless I can have more than one array on the SCSI controller??
I just need to confirm if I can do both of them at the same time, and if that SATA controller will do the trick for them.
gomesi
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April 12th, 2012 14:00
This is a tough one but I've done similar before.