configure 2-bay hotplug drive cage installed in an ml350 g4

[joe schmidt]

Need a little help to point me in the right direction. I've installed a hotplug drive cage in the media bay and populated it with two 36.4GB scsi drives which will serve as the location for my server's OS. My question is how do you configure the two drives in the hotplug drive cage to mirror each other (raid 1). Right now the hotplug drive cage is connected to the internal 64 bit dual channel u320 HBA. I've used the ORCA, but only my smart array card shows up in that config (hp 641 array card is connected to my data array and has 6 drives installed, setup as a raid 5) Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Steven Clementi · Accepted solution]

Joe:


You need to connect the drive cage to the second channel of the Smart Array or the first if your already using the second. Without the drives being on the Smart Array, you will not be able to set up hardware based RAID1.


Steven

[joe schmidt]

I think I may have solved my own question, what I need is another raid controller since imbedded scsi controller is non-raid. The HP smart array 641 only allows for one channel to connect to it, so I will have to purchase another HP smart array 641. I would appreciate input on this if you can think of an alternative. Thanks.

[Steven Clementi]

Ah, yes indeed. It does only have 1 channel.

If you are in the mood to be fancy, I would go for a 6402.

It comes with Battary Backed Write Cache and more Cache than the 641. It has 2 channels and should work nicely, taking only 1 slot in the server vs. 2 for the 2 641's.


Just an idea.

Steven

[joe schmidt]

Thank you for confirming what I feared. The server only came with a smart array 641. Looks like I will just have to buy another one since the 642 or the 6402 is more than I want to spend. Thanks again.

[Steven Clementi]

Maybe you can sell the 641 to cover the difference? (and get the 6402).


Steven