MSA20 with 12-1TB Drives

[Bret Steele]

I'm having some trouble with our MSA20. We just upgraded the Hard Drives from 6-500GB drives to 12-1TB drives and the largest array I can make is 2TB. I know I can use the Windows Disk Management to span drives but I'm really looking to handle it all using hardware and make a RAID 6 which would leave roughly 10TB available. Does anyone have any experience or ideas on this? I am using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 SP1. Thanks for your help!

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi Bret,

I'm fairly certain the MSA20 is still limited to a maximum logical disk size of 2TB, as it has a SCSI interface. This is a limitation of the SCSI protocol.

The QuickSpecs here:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/11942_div/11942_div.html

do mention the 2TB limit.

If you need to go beyond that you need something like the MSA60, which has a SAS Host interface, connected to a P800 SmartArray.

Cheers,

Rob

[Bret Steele]

Hi Rob - thanks for the response. I had seen that but was keeping my fingers crossed that there had to be some other way! I've gone ahead and created 6 2TB array's and then used the Windows Disk Management to spam the drives for now but I'll have to wait and see how the performance is doing it this way and I'm going to guess that it isn't going to be great.