PowerEdge 2850 – Configure SCSI Hard Drives and RAID

dell-poweredgeraidwindows-server-2008

I'm trying to set up a Poweredge 2850 as a web server, but as a server novice it's causing me some confusion.

Its a virgin install so no data to be lost as yet, so I'd like to get the best arrangement for setting up Windows Server 2008. The box will run IIS, a mail and FTP server.

The current physical arrangement of the hot swap drives is 

1 73GB   3 146GB   5 blank
0 73GB   2 146GB   4 146GB (but flashes green, amber off)

When I enter the PERC config screens on boot up I've got

   Raid Ch- 0
ID

0 ONLIN A00-00
1 ONLIN A00-01
2 ONLIN A01-00
3 ONLIN A01-01
4 HOTSP

I think that drives 0 and 1 are set to RAID 1 and drives 2 and 3 are also set to RAID 1, certainly I can see 2 logical drives, both raid 1 of 69880MB and 139900MB

Now what I think I am getting here is that the 2x 73GB drives mirror each other and the 2x 146GB drives mirror as well? so by my noob thinking if a drive fails I can pull it, insert and new one and it will reduplicate from its matching pair?

I think the flashing amber probably indicates a failing drive in slot 4, should that just be binned?

What confuses me coming from a home user XP background is that when I load up Windows Server 2008 OS under my computer I only see a C drive of about 70GB capacity. i.e wheres the 146GB drive?

Any advice appreciated

Best Answer

Yeah, it sounds like 0 and 1 are RAID 1 (mirror) and 2 and 3 are also RAID 1. As for disk 4, take a look here. That is the manual for your 2850 and shows you what all the various blinking scenarios on the disks mean.

You mention you don't see the second RAID set in Windows. Are you just looking at Windows Explorer? If yes, that's normal. You need to launch Server Manager, navigate to Disk Management and there you should see the 146GB drive. Right-click it to initialize and format the disk and assign it a letter. Once it finishes formatting, you'll see it in Explorer just like the 73GB mirror.

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