HP Ml350 g6 410i raid config with 8 600gb drives

[bruce shaw]

Looking for some advice on configuring an ML350 G6 with the 410i on-board controller. The machine is being built with new SAS drives of 600GB capacity. We have 8 drives available (had 8 300GB drives but the dataset to be transferred is really large - 150GB from 75GB within 1-1.25 years.) So we picked up some bigger new drives to hopefully last a couple years longer before we upgrade again. However, after running the ACU with a std. RAID 5 array config (w/512bit) using all 6 drives and saving the other 2 for spares (not sure if we want to use them for hotswap or not yet), we realized that we couldn't use the full space of the 6 drives (>2TBs).

We wanted to use the extra arms to get a little better performance since there's about 30 or so individuals hitting the DB and on the older server with 4 drives, it gets slow. Maybe we should just go back to the 300 GB drives to fit under the 2TB limitation and retain a simpler, easier to manage RAID config?

So any ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!

[Jimmy Vance]

Maybe create the array like you've mentioned and then create 2 logical drives withing the array. A small logical drive for the OS and related logs and a large logical drive to contain the database

[bruce shaw]

So you're proposing that we run the ACU but instead of making the full 6 drive array as 1 flat space (6 X 600GB in RAID5), to make 1 logical drive  for the OS, etc. (ie, a 500-600 GB logical drive as an example) and another logical drive (with the rest of the space, ~ 1.8TB roughly).

[Jimmy Vance]

---

@bruce shaw wrote:

So you're proposing that we run the ACU but instead of making the full 6 drive array as 1 flat space (6 X 600GB in RAID5), to make 1 logical drive  for the OS, etc. (ie, a 500-600 GB logical drive as an example) and another logical drive (with the rest of the space, ~ 1.8TB roughly).

---

YeYes, that is what I'm suggesting