topic Re: Optimizing usable disk on DL320 in ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL)

Optimizing usable disk on DL320

markcin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:27:16 GMT

I have a DL320 with (4) 1 TB SATA drives, using HP SmartArray E200 RAID controller. Drives are configured in a RAID 5 configuration with a 256K stripe. Server will provide archival storage of very large VMware ESX image snapshots replicated from an ESX server.

Server will be running Windows Server 2003 R2 64-bit. OS partition is 50 GB.

After installing Windows, I went to create 2 more partitions. Windows shows 2 chunks of unallocated space as expected - one space is 1998 GB (due to the 2 TB limit), and the other is the remaining 746 GB.

What I was not expecting is to see that Windows will not let me create a partition on the 746 GB unallocated space. The option is unavailable. I can create the ~2 TB partition, but can not make use of the second unallocated space.

So how do I make use of this remaining 746 GB?

Thanks

Re: Optimizing usable disk on DL320

Lesley Persyn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:04:44 GMT

Verify that you SmartArray E200 firmware version is at least 1.66. Higher version supports +2tb. Try to update to latest because some improvements about RW issue's.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=1157688&prodNameId=3182559&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-a19193ac39ff4415880d312c65

Re: Optimizing usable disk on DL320

markcin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:24:18 GMT

Thank you for your suggestion. I checked, and the firmware ver is 1.82, which appears to be the latest available on the support page.

I don't think it's a limitation of the controller, though, since the ACU was able to create a logical drive for Windows to allocate space from during install (that's the 50 GB I created during install) and that logical was nearly 3 TB.

The issue I think is that now that Windows is installed and I want to create additional storage partitions, I can create a 2 TB partition, but will not let me do anything with the remaining 746 GB.

Attached screen shot shows "New Partition..." grayed out in Disk Management.