The PV650F doesn't support metaluns like the CX-series from EMC does, and a LUN can only exist in a single set of disks (aka disk pool (AX100 terminology) or raid group (FC- and CX-terminology)). So you're indeed limited to 16 x max drive size (73GB with the last firmware Dell released for the unit).

DevMgr,
Thanks for the reply.

So, let's say I have one 650F and four 630's.

Each hold 10 drives, for a total of 50 drives.

Since I can have a max of 16 drives per LUN, if I maxed out each LUN I would have:

LUN 0 (16 drives) - 1 logical volume in Windows (I'll call it drive G)
LUN 1 (16 drives) - 1 logical volume in Windows (I'll call it drive H)
LUN 2 (16 drives) - 1 logical volume in Windows (I'll call it drive I)
2 Global hot spares
-------------------
Total = 50 drives

Would this be right? (no way to assemble G: H: & and I: into one volume?)

In reality, my setup will probably be more like this:

LUN 0 (10 drives) in DAE1 - 1 logical volume in Windows (I'll call it drive G)
LUN 1 (10 drives) in DAE2 - 1 logical volume in Windows (I'll call it drive H)
LUN 2 (10 drives) in DAE3 - 1 logical volume in Windows (I'll call it drive I)
LUN 3 (10 drives) in DAE4 - 1 logical volume in Windows (I'll call it drive J)
10 Global Hot Spares in DAE 5

Thanks for your input,

Andrew

Message Edited by andrew_va on 08-09-2005 09:37 AM

You can use dynamic disk to merge them by striping them, tho I personally am not a big fan of dynamic disks as it adds a layer between the OS and the storage space and if for whatever reason one of the LUNs is lost (double drive failure or other cause), all your data is lost.

That's a good point re: Dynamic Disks. I am using 2000 Server and I think it supports Dynamic disks. I'll have to think about it...

Thanks,
Andrew

As Dev says, with dynamic disks you can stripe or concatenate(join at the end) the volumes. If you are using 2003 server. You could use DFS and lumps them into a shared pool.