Disk Configuration on MSA 1000

[Bruce.Provan]

Now I have access to the SAN thanks to the suppport forum, I am now looking for some guidance on the disk configuration. There are 6 x 146gb hdds installed, disk01 is a spare which leaves 5 x 146gb = 700gb approx. Why does it then show that I have a logical 560gb, I have tried to explain it as larger cluster sizes to improve performance but should that use 170gb. I feel ilke I am losing a whole hardrive here. Is this because of the raid 5 array, I have attached a config file for information.

[Chris Rosan · Accepted solution]

Bruce,

If you've set it up in Raid 5 then you will lose 1 drive for parity/redundancy. Unless you don't care what happens if you have a drive failure, i would definately recommend Raid 5 AND the on-line spare. For the price of storage now, it's a LOT cheaper to buy another drive than the impact/cost/inconveneice of an outage if you have to rebuild ALL systems on the MSA because you lost 2 disks.

I've found that once 1 disk goes, replace it ASAP because quite often another will go shortly after. If you lose 2 disks in mirror set then you'll lose everything. With the on-line spare you won't. The online spare will be ok if you've striped it, but if you need that sort of performance you shouldn't be running the MSA1000.