Smart-2 controller channel use

[Iain Marshall]

I have a Proliant 5500 with Smart-2 controller, which connects to an external drive enclosure.
The external enclosure is fully populated with drives. Can I add and extra 2 drives to the 5500's *internal* drive bays, connect the internal drive bays to the second channel of the Smart-2 controller and create a mirrored pair ? I want to add more space to my Netware 4.11 server on this server.

[Iain Marshall]

I meant to ask another question in my original email...
If I create a new RAID array (raid 1, 5 or whatever) using disks on the internal drive bays, can I move the disks to the external drive enclosure and maintain the raid config, and data (obviously) on the disks ?
Assuming the disks go in the drive bays on the same order, I wouldn't loose all my data would I ?

Iain Marshall

[Terry Hutchings · Accepted solution]

I'm not positive I understand the first post. Are you asking if internal drives can be attached to the same controller and just be a part of a separate array? If this is the question, then the answer is yes.

You should be able to move drives from the internal port to the external port with no problem. It's possible, if these are two separate arrays, it may change the array order though (what used to be array A may change to B and vice versa). This is unlikely to happen though. If the controller has the latest firmware on it, then keeping the order of the drives when they're moved around isn't important. The controller will be able to see they've been moved and will update itself.

[Janine Bertolo]

Hi Iain;

Presuming you have a dual-channel Smart-2 controller (basically any one BUT the 2SL or 221) you can do perform all of the additions that you suggest.

The 2SL and 221 have two connectors - one internal and one external - but only one channel.

Cheers,

Janine

[Iain Marshall]

Thanks for replying Terry and Janine. I'm going to try it out as soon as I can arrange server downtime (just in case).

I thought just occured...when I do insert drives into the internal drive bays (which is connected to the second SMART-2 controller port), can I switch the boot drive from one controller cahnnel to the other one, or does the boot drive always have to be on channel A ?
I know that I can only set the boot controller order in the BIOS, but not the channel on the controller.

[Terry Hutchings]

The boot drive is normally not something which can be changed. The boot drive doesn't have to be on bus 1, but I would recommend making sure the boot drive is still part of array A.