Dell 2550 Perc 3 SCSI Raid. Need advice/Help.

[eod]

I have a PowerEdge 2550 that was setup as a basic disk setup. My goal would be to get the raid active.

Here is the current disk setup:
5 x 36Gig Scsi HD's
PERC 3 128 mb
(54 meg dell partition, 4 gig OS partition, 78 gig data partition and 53 unallocated gigs)

I thought that the earlier person had setup the system as a raid but upon a closer look, it appears that everything is just configured as
basic disks. Is there a way that I can rebuild so that the data is in a Array without having to format and rebuild the OS?

What raid config would you recommend. I'm open to suggestions. Let me know if you need me to be more verbose in anything else.

Thanks a lot! (Tek-Tips has saved me a few times and hoping for another)

 

[johnny99]

There is only room for 4 disks in a 2550, so it must be a different server you have. Could be a 2650 or a 2500.

If you don't have special needs go for RAID5. That will give you the most out of your disks.

/johnny

 

[johnv20]

Hi,
sorry Johnny99 but a 2550 can have 5 disks, 4 in the main drive bay and 1 in a peripheral bay under the CD

 

[NickFerrar]

If you want the OS as part of the RAID set then you'll have to rebuild. If you keep the 36GB disk the OS is on separate and just make a RAID container with the remaining 4 disks it should be OK - but that not only wastes a disk but leaves the OS disk vulnerable.

As someone else said above - RAID5 should be fine if it's just some fault tolerance you're after.

 

[eod]

Question: Is it desirable to have your OS on the RAID?

 

[NickFerrar]

Yes and no (on RAID5). Personally I'd prefer a mirror set for the OS and a separate RAID5 set for data but we generally end up buying the cheapest - meaning stick everything on RAID5. We haven't had any problems with this but is performance is critical you might want to look at off-loading the OS to a different controller/RAID set. That's not to say RAID5 is slow - for file and print it's perfectly fine.

 

[SteveTheGeek]

By the way, are you looking for hardware RAID or software RAID?
-Steve

 

[ChuckCraig]

Sounds like this is setup as a raid alrady, in hardware raid, windows sees the array as one big disk, and it should be formatted as a simple disk. You only need active disks for software raid.