PV220 - Converting Joined to Split bus

I would definately make a backup of your data before doing anything like this, but once you have that, verify how your stripe is set up. You should be able to move the last 4 drives to the 2nd half of the enclosure, change the slider to split bus, hook up a cable to the 2nd port on the raid controller (I assume it's not used internally in the server). Now if you boot up the server go into the perc bios and confirm it still sees the virtual drive setup. The AMI-based raid controllers store the disk configuration both on the disk and in the perc bios. If there is a discrepancy, with newer bioses it will accept what the disks say the config is. It should pick this up therefor automatically.

Keep in mind that this is in a perfect world, and on a rare occasion this might not work out 100% as planned, so have your backups ready in case you need them.

Thanks for the info.  I am actually amazed that it "should" work this easily.  We have nightly backups of the databases stored on the array (stored on a NAS PV).  As well, the databases are reporting databases, so the data can be regenerated at any time from our source DB (on a seperate server), in a worst case scenario.

We will only need to move 3 drives, because one of the eight had to physically be on the other side of the PV220 when we last added drives. :)

Oh yeah - this is a dynamic disk as well...  I hope this doesn't cause an issue, because we had the whole array wiped once when dealing with dynamic disks during an OS reinstall using DELL's Server Assistant - that was ugly.

I would also assume that we should intelligently pick the drives we wish to move, resulting in each half of the enclosure being a mirror of the other.