Consolidating Virtual Disks

Question

I currently have two Virtual Disks set up as RAID-10 (one with 14 136gb drives, the other with 4 300gb drives) which contain data. A third Virtual Disk (RAID-1) contains the OS, but I am not altering that. I want to consolidate the two data Virtual Disks in an effort to streamline our file structure. However, they are on different connectors of the RAID controller and the resulting Virtual Disk will be mixing two different capacity drives.

Here's my question - is it advisable to create a single Virtual Disk (RAID-10) that will be approximately 1.5tb? I've heard that RAID-5 becomes unstable with larger drives. Do I need to worry about RAID-10?

As far as I can figure, I will have to backup all my data and completely break apart the current Virtual Disks and then rebuild a single Virtual Disk. Is that correct? Both of these are BASIC disks.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
-Steve

My Setup:
PE2600 Win2003 Server Standard Edition, SP2
Perc 4/DC RAID Controller
PV220 External Data Array
Virtual Disk 0: RAID-1 (2 34gb SCSIs on backplane - contains system)
Virtual Disk 1: RAID-10 (14 136gb SCSIs in PV220)
Virtual Disk 2: RAID-10 (4 280gb SCSIs on backplane)

jcn77056 · Answer

I did a quick read of the manual and it says the controller supports up to 28 drives in the RAID-10 configuration.   Where it may get tricky is handling the drives with different capacities.  I'm not sure if it's going to limit the 300Gb drives to 136Gb to match the others or if it will figure out how to mix the sizes.   You will have to re-create the volume and reload the data.  That's a lot of data.

snapohead · Answer

It will limit the larger drive size to the size of the smaller drives.

Dev Mgr · Answer

With raid 5, the resulting size is calculated with the following formula:

smallest drive size x (number of drives - 1)

With raid 10 (or raid 1) the formula is:

smallest drive size / 2

So if you mix 146GB drives and 300GB drives, you indeed will only be able to use 146GB on each of the 300's.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

Consolidating Virtual Disks

Was this post helpful?