raid 5 drive set

[Lance Oakley]

Just completed the rack and stack of my dl380g5 ordered with 4 x 72gb 2.5 sas drives on p600 controller, with 3 active and 1 spare drive. q: if/when 1 of the 3 drives fails does the spare drive automatically kick in or is there some manual effort on my part. I could not locate much info concerning how raid 5 works other than steps to setup for windows 2003 server.
Thanks,
Lance

[Uwe Zessin]

Yes, that's the purpose of a spare disk ;-)

Seriously, make sure that the disk is really marked as a spare. An unassigned disk will not be used.

[Lance Oakley]

Thanks. The array is shown as Logical Drive # 1, RAID 5, 136.7GB, with online spare. Shows three 72GB drives and the spare so guess it is good to go... Just one small item - why only 136.7GB with 3 x 72GB active? Does the raid actually tie up 72GB accross the 3 drives? Once again, thanks.
Lance

[Steven Clementi]

RAID 5 = Storage - 1 disk

72G Disk + 72G Disk + 72 Disk - 72G Parity Stripted = 144 (136BG)

The short answer is, yes. In this case, 33% of the space. As you increase the amount of disks, the percentage drops. (3-33%, 4-25%, 5-20%, 6-16.6%, etc, etc, etc).

[Lance Oakley]

I got a ways into the win 2003 OS with a single large 136GB partition. I wish to start all over and allocate two partitions, C: for the OS and D: for anything else. How do I reformat the disks but keep the 3 active raid 5 with a spare drive structure?
Thanks,
Lance

[Steven Clementi · Accepted solution]

You would simply create 2 logical drives on the array.

You can do with with the SmartStart CD and the ACU utility found on it. Boot/setup using smartstart and one of the first steps is to configure your array/logical drives.


Steven

[Lance Oakley]

Thanks Steven. I'll give it a shot...
Lance