Dell Raid, why more than 1 container?

[mapleusa]

I am new to Raid so I only have a basic understanding. I am told that older Raid hardware only accepted one container, but the new Dell Servers (Perc3) we received allows you to create multiple containers. If fact the servers came factory installed with two raid 5 containers (1 at 4GB the other the remaining 33GB) made from the same physical hard drives. I have to reformat some of the servers and was wondering if I should change the containers. What are the advantages to using multiple containers? Does this have anything to do with Raid 30, 50, etc.?

Thanks in advance

 

[MJewell]

Actually, I have a Dell PE4400 at work and had problems when I changed it to just 1 container, Dell told me to put it back to 2 containers and I haven't had any problems since... Although I do normally change it to 8g and balance instead of 4g and balance, but I hate running out of space on C:...

Mike

 

[NickFerrar]

I'm not sure why Dell do this either, there should be no reason why a single container shouldn't work fine. In fact most of our servers have been rebuilt with a single container.

I did hear from someone that you get less fragmentation if you split the OS files onto a separate RAID containter but I can't really see why. AFAIK fragmentation occurs at the file system level not at a level that RAID would help.

Only reason I would use multiple containers is if you had a dual channel card and splittable backplane. That way I'd do a straight mirror for the system files and a RAID5 set for the data.

 

[jcenso]

I have just purchased some PowerEdge servers from Dell that came with 4GB boot containers, Win2K server installed. I wish they would have made them 8GB instead as when all the critical updates and SPK3 are installed, with 2GB RAM it maxs out the C: partition. I'm struggling to rebuild these mission critical servers using V2i from PowerQuest. So far it works fine on the 2550 but my 2650 will not boot after coping the image into the new 8GB container. I have to use a WIN2K bootfloppy to get it to boot.