Does the PERC6i card support multiple RAID arrays?

Question

I'm looking to expand storage with my PE 2950. It has a PERC6i card that currently runs two SAS drives in a RAID 10 configuration, used as my OS partition.

I'd like to add a couple SATA drives (1TB+ each) as a RAID configuration (most likely RAID 10). The newly added drives would function purely as data storage and I would continue to run the OS off the SAS RAID array.

Is it possible to run two different RAID configurations using that single controller card? If so, is this a pretty standard setup?

Solution 1

It can run multiple arrays per the manual.

What I'm pretty positive it will not do is allow you to mix SAS and SATA drives.

Update: while the information above came from that same coworker in conversations (because it'd be nice to have SAS for operating system, etc. plus SATA for big storage), the situation appears to actually be that you can mix SAS and SATA drives, but apparently Dell doesn't support that configuration and won't provide warranty support related to it. Sources:

• Dell mailing list
• SpiceWorks forum

Solution 2

Yes, you can run multiple RAID configs off one controller, and while I wouldn't call it standard, it's not particularly rare. The biggest hit you take is that the write cache gets split up amongst the different arrays, which slows things down in write-heavy scenarios.

Comments

[MDMarra]

I think you mean RAID 1?

[Jim Geurts]

I want to update this question. I have added additional drives to my PowerEdge 2950. Everything worked flawlessly. I purchased Dell CC852 trays and PN939 interposers for two Western Digital RE3 drives. It was a breeze to set the drives up in RAID 1.

[MDMarra]

You certainly can run SAS and SATA drives off of a PERC6i in a mixed configuration. You need an interposer for each SATA drive and you should not mix them in the same virtual disk, but in the proposed configuration it is fine with an interposer.

[fencepost]

Revised to reflect that drive types can be mixed but are officially unsupported, links to discussion of doing just that.