Hi there,

presently I cannot afford an exact value of adressable amount of TB`s of storage, but of course you can adress the 4 X 1,5 TB hdds without problems with PERC 6I, but please also note that , if using windows 2003 std 32 bit, that windows only can adress 2 TB, thats all exempt the raid 5 is a seperate drive, then , after inserting drives, creating raid 5 and initialized it, navitage to disk management of windows and create a gpt drive, then you can adress more than 2 tb, but it does not work with the booting partition, windows 2003 std 32 bit won`t boot from a lun greater than 2 tb.

Specs of your PERC 6 i can be found at http://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/storage/RAID/PERC6/en/index.htm

Cheers

Marcus

"Hi there,

presently I cannot afford an exact value of adressable amount of TB`s of storage, but of course you can adress the 4 X 1,5 TB hdds without problems with PERC 6I, but please also note that , if using windows 2003 std 32 bit, that windows only can adress 2 TB, thats all exempt the raid 5 is a seperate drive, then , after inserting drives, creating raid 5 and initialized it, navitage to disk management of windows and create a gpt drive, then you can adress more than 2 tb, but it does not work with the booting partition, windows 2003 std 32 bit won`t boot from a lun greater than 2 tb.

Specs of your PERC 6 i can be found at http://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/storage/RAID/PERC6/en/index.htm

Cheers

Marcus"

The boot drive is a seperate 60G drive. So you are sayiing using four 1.5TB drives and GPT we should be good to go? I have configured >2TB raid arrays but not with the Dell Perc 6 card.

Hi,

I understood you created a single raid 5 and partioned it in controller bios, you should see 2 virtual drives, 1 with 60 gb and the 2nd with remaing space, is that correct ?
when you are create a raid 5 over all 4 1,5 TB drives (hmm at the moment I cannot remember that we are offering 1,5 TB drives) , anyway, if the 2nd partion is bigger than 2 TB , you cannot adress it on windows 32 bit operating system, to do so you need to open up the disk management and change the MBR to GPT you can adress the space above 2TB on 32 bit MS operating system. When you are using a 64 bit operating system its not needed.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT-on-x64.mspx

Te PErc 6 can adress more than 2 TB , I personally setup raid 5 virtual disks with 1tb and had a virtual of about 3,9 TB , but I used an o64 bit MS operating system instead of 32 bit, so the gpt procedure wasnt necessary

Cheers

Marcus

Yes. The OS and programs are on the single 60G drive. The Raid Array at the moment is using four 500G drives, and storage is inadequite. Therefore I'm looking at replacing those four drives with either 1T or 1.5TB. I do not know if there is a "must have" for specifications for it to function normally. I see some drives are still spinning at 5400rpm, whilst some are at 7200rpm. However I've been told that faster is not always better. Any comment on that?

Camperx-In short I think he's saying the card will perform fine with the size of storage you are talking about IF your OS can. I currently have a PE2900 with a 6i card in it. It currently has 2x 160GB drives in RAID 1, 4x 2TB drives in RAID 5, and 2x 1.5TB drives in RAID 1 attached to it. The card and arrays work fine but I'd be sure to either get the drives from Dell or at least getting "Enterprise Grade" drives available else where in the market. Dell support with the drives will of course require you to get them from Dell.

Best of Luck!