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March 7th, 2013 09:00

Moving from PowerEdge 4400 to PowerEdge 2600 - Questions regarding moving RAID and 2600 Add Drives

We are moving a webserver from a Dell PowerEdge 4400 that currently has the following configuration

Dell Perc 3/i Raid Controller

2 U320 Drives in RAID 1  for Windows Server 2003 OS and IIS6 on C:

6X U320 Drives in RAID 10 for IIS Files as D

The PowerEdge 2600 has 6 U320 Slots which from what I can tell will support RAID10  I've also read that you can put an additional 2 U320 drives in the 5 1/4 slots using a special cage and daughter card.  Our intention would be to have these two drives as the OS as on the 4400 and the 6 in RAID 10 the same as the 4400 as well.

So questions:

1.  What are the parts that are needed to add the two additional U320 drives to the 2600 in the 5 1/4 slots?

2.  We want to remove the drives from the 4400 and place them exactly in the same setup/slots on the 2600.  Since my understanding is the RAID Arrays are tied to the PERC/3i - how can we get the 2600 to recognize the RAID1 and RAID10 arrays from the 4400 and continue on without data loss?

3.  After successful boot, we figure that Server 2003 should just do a new hardware config since the drives have been moved to new hardware and after that everything should be up and running as it was on the 4400 - just on newer and faster hardware.  Is this correct?

Thanks in advance

990 Posts

March 7th, 2013 11:00

Thanks for your questions.

1. To add the media bay, you will need the following parts:

www.impactcomputers.com/d1737.html   Media bay with board

www.impactcomputers.com/0h924.html   Planar to 1x2 Backplane SCSI 68Pin Round Data Cable

2.This sounds like an easy swap; however, your 4400 is running an Adaptec Perc 3/di; the 2600 is running a LSI Perc 4/di.   The two configurations are not compatible, so you will need to back up the data and restore to the 2600 once you have created your arrays. You will need to reinstall the OS as well.

3. As stated previously, you won't get a successful boot without recreating the arrays on the Perc 4/di.  

Regards,

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