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user782

11 Posts

8800

November 20th, 2007 21:00

Storage Size Confusion

Hi,
 
I've just purchased an NX1950/MD3000 with 15 x 300GB SAS Drives. I'm just looking at sharing the storage out through the NX1950 (CIFS). Is there any reason why I can't or maybe shouldn't just create a single RAID-5 array with all the drives to contain a hot spare as well (so 13 drives usable space)? Any tips on how to choose the number of groups/virtual disks in a simple file serving scenario would be great. I see that the Automatic Configuation chooses to split the total drives into 4 sets - any reason for this?
 
thanks.

Dev Mgr

6 Operator

 • 

9.3K Posts

November 21st, 2007 16:00

The MD3000 supports virtual disks up to 2036GB (just shy of 2TB) in size. So with 13 x 300 (or 13 x 278GB (see here if you're not familiar with hard drive size measurements) comes to about 3.6TB. This means at best you can create a 2TB virtual disk and then a 2nd virtual disk (on the same raid 5) of the remainder.

user782

11 Posts

November 21st, 2007 21:00

Thanks for the reply. I've been told that the 2TB limit is actually a firmware restriction on the MD3000 units. Any ideas if this is going to be lifted with an update?

Dev Mgr

6 Operator

 • 

9.3K Posts

November 22nd, 2007 12:00

No idea, but in the MD3000i brochure (available from here) there's talk of adding support for SATA drives in a firmware that'll be released in the 4th quarter this year (current quarter in other words).

So it looks like Dell is definitly working on adding features to the MD3000-series still. With Dell selling up to 1 TB SATA drives in an MD1000 I would think that if the MD3000-series starts supporting these size drives, virtual disk size limits of 2TB don't make a lot of sense.

One thing to keep in mind is that the MD3000 is a favorable choice for cluster setups, and Windows 2003 clusters by default cannot use GPT (needed to partition (virtual) disks that are larger than 2TB). There is a Microsoft hotfix for this ( here), but you have to call Microsoft to get this hotfix (not a major issue, but for some reason they don't have it readily available for download from their site).

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