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8016
August 25th, 2005 19:00
adding external hard drive to PowerEdge 2650
Hello,
I have a PE2650 that I use for database servers. It has PERC 3/Di installed and in use.
I made a choice to use one drive (drive 0) for system and programs (the "boot" drive) and the other four drives to make two mirrored partitions; one for DATA and one for LOGS.
After a scary encounter with "bad bits" and corrupt NTFS on the boot drive, I would really like to mirror it ASAP. "BLUE Sky" scenario is a new 2850 with 6 drives; two for system, two for data and 2 for logs, but I am not open to buy for a few months yet. So what options do I have, if any, to add an external SCSI enclosure and add a drive to mirror the existing single system drive?
Is there even an interface for me to tap into off the SCSI backplane?
Thanks.
I have a PE2650 that I use for database servers. It has PERC 3/Di installed and in use.
I made a choice to use one drive (drive 0) for system and programs (the "boot" drive) and the other four drives to make two mirrored partitions; one for DATA and one for LOGS.
After a scary encounter with "bad bits" and corrupt NTFS on the boot drive, I would really like to mirror it ASAP. "BLUE Sky" scenario is a new 2850 with 6 drives; two for system, two for data and 2 for logs, but I am not open to buy for a few months yet. So what options do I have, if any, to add an external SCSI enclosure and add a drive to mirror the existing single system drive?
Is there even an interface for me to tap into off the SCSI backplane?
Thanks.
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warwizard55
720 Posts
0
August 25th, 2005 22:00
Hi topdown,
You are mostly up the stream on this one, (without paddle). In order to add external SCSI drive you would need to add a controller card to the system, (either SCSI or SCSI-RAID) the backplane IS splittable however it splits into a 1x2 and a 1x3, so that would mess with your pair of RAID 1's. That puts you in the position of leaving the boot drive as a RAID 0 in the RAID system and running a S/W mirror to the new drive, better but still not optimal.
If you can rebuild the system and take the performance hit, I propose the following:
ID0 and ID1, RAID 1, containing partitions for O/S and LOGS
ID2, ID3, and ID4, RAID 5 with partition for DATA
This is the configuration this server was engineered to support with it's split backplane. A seperate controller was used for the data array to improve thruput.
Please run consistancy check on all (non RAID 0) arrays, to find and remap any bad sectors before you start making any changes to the LOGS and DATA arrays.
warwizard DCSP