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PE2950 + PERC6/i maximum disk size?
Hi all
I recently bought a refurbished PE2950 to replace an older PE2600 we operate. The 2600 is still soldiering on but we deal with quite a lot of large files, so all six SCSI disks are now pretty much full. The 2950 is already loaded up with 4 x 146GB 15k SAS disks, which I've split up into a pair of RAID 1 vdisks. One for Windows and one for Exchange/SQL and shares. So far so good.
My plan is to use the remaining 2 drive bays for a third RAID 1 array. This will be for our ever-growing store of files. So the question is this: What's the largest array I can rustle up from these last two bays? Obviously I'd like to stuff a pair of 2gb SAS disks in there but I'm not sure if the BIOS or controller will take it. With the most recent firmware updates applied, what's the best I'll do? Will it be more economical to use a couple of enterprise SATA disks and interposers, or will this carry problems of its own?
Cheers folks!
Dev Mgr
9.3K Posts
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October 31st, 2011 07:00
One note to add to Daniel as he didn't mention this and it plays a role for your setup; the PERC6-series supports physical disks only up to 2TB, so you cannot take 2 x 3TB drives and make them a raid 1.
Only the PERC H700 (with an up to date firmware) will support 2+TB physical drives, but that controller isn't supported/validated for a 2950.
Anonymous
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5 Practitioner
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274.2K Posts
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October 31st, 2011 07:00
PERC6 (and PERC5) controllers allow for virtual disk sizes greater than 2TB. Two factors now determine the maximum amount of storage that can be used in a single virtual disk:
The maximum virtual disk size is now limited by the number of physical disks that can be combined to create one virtual disk, which is 32 physical disks.
Different operating systems have maximum partition sizes for both boot and non-boot partitions.
monsterman1234
2 Posts
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October 31st, 2011 07:00
Thanks for the info. I was really looking for the harware limitations ot my two remaining SAS bays. Will these take 1TB SAS drives or is the limit lower? And if I use SATA disks and interposers, will it affect the performance of the other four disks on the same backplane?
Thanks!
TechDist10
2 Posts
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January 18th, 2018 16:00
So what i understand here is that creating virtual disks on PERC 6/i it's only allowed individually to up to 2TB? I just tried to create one combining both drivers which add up to 3.5tb and it failed as a RAID0 which already exists with 135gb foreign and it's second 135 for redundancy.
JancelGarcia
1 Message
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February 23rd, 2021 17:00
I loguer to UP 14TB
*-disk
product: PERC 6/i
vendor: DELL
physical id: 2.0.0
bus info: scsi@2:2.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda
version: 1.22
serial: 005fb4100448f45e26007f7644b0b242
size: 13TiB (15TB)
capabilities: gpt-1.00 partitioned partitioned:gpt
configuration: ansiversion=5 guid=fdc6411c-367b-4d48-8f27-ad79b8977c17 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512