Creating Containters for RAID 5 on PE 2400

[kings23]

I building a PE 2400 with the Perc 2/si RAID controller and 5 10k 18GB SCSI drives. I need the RAID 5 set up for redundancy but I'm looking for the right solution on creating the correct containers. I've just been testing it with different scenarios and currently I have it like this: I went into the configuration utility and created a container with only the #0 drive using 7GB of it. I didn't add any of the other drives to the container. I then used the openmanage server assistant to install windows 2000 server. Openmanage created a new virtual disk and overwrote the existing one and I used the remaining space on all the hard drives for this and proceeded to install. Disk management shows the 7GB for cos) and all the rest unallocated.

What's the best solution for making all drives #0-4 RAID 5 or just making drives #1-4 RAID 5 and just have drive #0 setup as RAID1. I'm looking answers on how to create the containers for redundancy in that I can swap out additional hard drives if one or more fails. I'm also looking for help on the virtual disk and how I should create that when it asks.

Thanks
Brian

 

[Seaspray0]

Raid 0 = mirror. Required 2 drives.
Raid 1 = stripped span. Requires 2 drives.
Raid 5 = stripped span with parity. Requires atleast 3 drives.

You can't set up drive 0 as a raid 1 by itself and there would be no fault tolerance if you did add another drive. You have two choices from what I see if you want fault tolerance.

1. drive 0 & 1 raid 0 (mirror) and drive 2,3,4 as raid 5 (stripe with parity). The space on the raid 0 will be equal to a single drive and the space on the raid 5 will be equal to 2 drives. You'll have excellent tolerance on the raid 1 and good tolerance on the raid 5 but alot less available space than option 2.

2. raid 5 drives 0,1,2,3,4 will give you one huge volume and the space equal to 4 drives. You will have good tolerance across the raid. I would use this option as the chance of more than one drive failing simultaneously at any given instance is low.

Besides fault tolerance on the drives, you must also consider a failure in the operating system which means no matter what choice you make, you should do backups to tape or other media (which gives you another point of recovery).

If you choose the raid 5, this will make the controller report a single volume with the space= 18 GB x 4. You can make more than one partition on this single volume (C drive, D drive, etc) if you desire.

Start, Help. You'll be surprised what's there. A+/MCP/MCSE/MCDBA

 

[tonymcp]

Sorry guys I think you got it wrong here:

Raid 0 = stripe set (without parity)
Raid 1 = mirrored set