HP Proliant Server Smart Array Controller Configuration

I'd start here: HP Smart Array P400 controller - Questions & Answers

Honestly though almost every decent RAID controller acts the same in the case of a single drive failure in a two disk RAID 1 array. Since the Smart Array is a true hardware RAID controller either drive can fail and the OS will still work just about as fast as it did with two drives. If you had a software based RAID controller (Some of the cheaper Promise models for instance) then you sometimes need a boot diskette to force booting off the second drive.

The HP Smart Array's are very good RAID controllers, they are decently fast, very reliable and dead simple to use. They are definitely my favorite embedded RAID controller. One great feature they have is being able to pull a set of drives from one system and stick it into another for recovery etc. purposes. Lot's of other RAID controller get very confused when you present them an array pulled from a different controller, not so the Smart Array. They just work!

I'm a HP-geek, you don't want to do it like that at all, here's how;

1. Throw away the P410, connect all disks to the P812.
2. Create two arrays, one RAID 10 array from the 14 x 146GB disks and a second RAID 1 from the 2 x 300GB disks. Assign one of the 146GB disks as a hot-spare to the first array.
3. Create logical disks from each array; LUN 1 at whatever size for boot disks, LUN 2 at whatever size for tempdb - carry on like this, basically let the array manage itself and don't worry about logical disk sizes matching physical disk sizes, it's not important, although obviously the backup disks will come from a single ~300GB second array so there's a limit to how you'll carve this up.

Is that clear? basically all the 146GB disks are in one big R10, backups are from a R1 array and use the P812 to just logically carve up the drives - it's easy and why you pay so much for the P812, let it do your work for you :)