Dell PE 1800 as a Backup Server: Can it use 1 + TB SATA HDD's?

[reporting]

We have a PE 1800 that has been sitting in our server room unused since we bought a PE 2950 a while back. When we bought the PE 1800, we ordered 5 x 160 GB SATA HDD's, driven by a CERC SATA 6 channel RAID controller.

There are now interesting applications that can backup over the network. We purchased one and used it to backup to a 2 TB networked NAS drive. We recently added some more drives to the PE 2950 and now have no more room on the NAS drive.

Rather than adding a couple more NAS drives, I had hoped that we could purchase some 2 TB SATA drives and reformat the PE 1800 (we ordered it with Windows SBS Server 2003) to act as a 6 or 8 TB Network Backup Server. Unfortunately, the CERC RAID controller can only handle a maximum of 2 TB with all drives!

Anyone known of a SATA controller that can give us 6 or 8 TB in a Windows environment?

Thanks very much,

John


John Marrett
Crystal Reports Trainer & Consultant
Maximizer CRM Trainer & Consultant

http://www.e-reporting.ca

 

[smah]

It can handle 1TB drives, but there was something funny that the CERC wouldn't do. It was a while ago that I set one up and I can't remember exactly what it wouldn't do; maybe it won't set them all up as 1 big stripe (raid 1) or something like that. Anyway, I have PE1800 with one 3TB RAID 10 array (6 x 1TB Barracudas) which is working fine, so I know for a fact that that scenario will work. And I'm fairly certain that it would have allowed them to be configured as 1 big RAID 5 array (5TB), so I suspect that you could get there with bigger drives.

 

[reporting]

That's just totally bizarre... In the CERC SATA Best Practices Reference Guide, I found the following:

Page 22: Note: Virtual disks or arrays larger than 2 Terabyte (TB) cannot be created on any Dell CERC controller. The SATA specification supports 2 TB Virtual Disk (array). However, the 2TB limitation on CERC SATA is imposed due to BIOS, driver, and Application Programming Interface (API) restrictions. Currently, Dell does not have any plans to support Virtual Disks larger than 2TB on the CERC SATA 1.5/6ch or the CERC SATA 1.5/2s. Due to this limitation, certain CE or RLM operations beyond the 2TB limit may not work.

Page 23: Note: The CERC SATA 1.5/6ch does not support hard drive sizes larger than or equal to 1 TB.

So I was under the impression that I would max out at 2 TB (same size as our non-RAID NAS device...) with the CERC SATA 1.5/6ch in our PE 1800... And you're saying you got 3 TB with the same controller?

If I can find a controller that can do this, then maybe I'll buy the drives and see if I can get the CERC to do it. Then, if I can't, I can just buy the controller. I looked on the Adaptec web site and couldn't find anything helpful. And their KBase was down...

Thanks very much,

John


John Marrett
Crystal Reports Trainer & Consultant
Maximizer CRM Trainer & Consultant

http://www.e-reporting.ca

 

[smah]

I take that back. I was going from memory and apparently I was wrong. I just logged in & checked. The one that I was thinking about is only using 500GB drives - therefore only 1.5TB total. Maybe that was the 'funny thing' that I remembered earlier. Sorry about that.