PERC 5/i and SAS 5/iR - what is maximum disk (SATA) capacity supported by this controllers?

PERC 5/i if intergrated doesnt support SATA. if it is the Adapter card then yes it will support SATA. as for the capacity of the drive, i think it will support any size up to 2TB

SAS 5/iR supports both drives SAS and  SATA and the same issue with the 2TB drive size.....

~Siget

So Dell PowerEdge 860 with SAS 5i/R internal controller will support configuration RAID1 (2*1TB) = 1TB  or RAID1 (2*2TB) = 2TB ?

All PERC 5 controllers (Integrated and Adapter) support both SAS and SATA HDDs (the above post is not accurate).

Currently standard HDDs have 512byte sectors and x86 architecture can map up to 32 bit addresses (2^32).

 512 * (2^32) = 2.2*10^12bytes = 2.2 TB, that is where compatibility problems may start.

The actual capacity of 2TB SATA HDD that hit the market recently is actually about 1.8 or 1.9 TB; lower than the 2.2TB critical capacity

No, all raid member disks can be up to 2.2TB so you can have however many you can connect. and configure them any any supported RAID config 0 - 1 - 5

I have a prec 5 setup with 8 x 2tb segate barracuda drive, split into 2 RAID 5's witch gives about 5.4 TB total drive size.