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Upgrading computer in raid 5 array

K

kairos

n00b
Joined
Apr 16, 2002
Messages
40
I have a few questions on the raid 5 array. I haven't set it up yet as I'm waiting on the case and ps to arrive.
I bought an escalade 8 channel pata raid card and 8 250Gig HDDs. The case I ordered can hold 19 drives or something, the new lian-li Lian-Li PC-V2000. To cut costs down for now I'm using and old athalon 2400 motherboard. I want to upgrade to a server motherboard with gagabit and pci-x. I'm going to run windows server 2003.

1) If I upgrade the motherboard and processor down the road will I lose my array settings. Will I need to rebuild it or will it all be fine if I just install it and turn it on. I would think that all the data would be on the hdd and would run fine.

2) If I install a second 8 channel controler card and 8 drives what could power the 17 drives (8x8x1 for OS)? The case I'm ordering has room for a seccond power supply but only if I mod it in the back as it was ment for fans.

Thanks for any info you can give. I'm new to this but have read up on it quite a bit.
 
I believe the array settings for 3Ware cards is held on the card itself and as data on the drives. You can move drives to a new controller and retain your settings. You can also swap out the motherboard and won't lose anything.

I have 5 3Ware cards in 2003 Servers and they all work very well. Be sure to upgrade the firmware of the card before you add any drives to it.

You might also want to make sure you have a good UPS for this machine. Loosing power while your RAID 5 array is writing data can be very very bad. The card has 2Mb of cache, as do your drives (or 8Mb) so there is a possibly of loosing a good chunk of your data. Or allocation data!

Also, be aware the PATA 3Ware cards can only scale up to 2Tb per/array. I have 7 x 300Gb in RAID 5 w/ a hot spare and it comes in at 1.7Tb after RAID / formatting. Make sure you don't go buying 500Gb drives later, as you may exceed that limit.
 
Personally Id probably toss in an N+1 Redundant PSU
http://www.rackmountpro.com/productsearch.cfm?catid=137
(a few samples, not necessarilly a source)
I picked up a Zippy MR3-6460P with a case off ebay for about as much as those are listed for :p
add up the individual rails for all the components
review > http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=761944
then start comparing PSU specs

you also need to check out how much memory the RAID Cards BIOS require at boot
that can sometimes be an issue when loading more than one BIOS

as kairos mentioned review > Write Hole
 
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