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What is the maximum disk space I can have for my Dell PowerEdge 2900. I know that the max for the OS partition is 2TB unless you do some special setup but for other volumes what is the max that I can take my RAID 5 to?

-- Edited to show important comment --

I'm not sure who down voted me but I think my question is being misunderstood. Is there a limit (besides what I can find in the market for enterprise hard drives) to how much my RAID controller can handle. In the specs it says it can only handle 3TB but from what I'm gathering it seems people could do more.

Gabriel Graves
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  • You didn't include nearly enough info here, like say the size and quantity of drives you have. – EEAA Feb 10 '13 at 21:16
  • The size is what I'm trying to figure out (what I can get for max) but the quantity is 3-4 hard drives. I know that RAID-5 must have a minimum of 3 and I can fit 4 in the top and bottom bay. – Gabriel Graves Feb 10 '13 at 21:33
  • How much usable disk space and how much disk space are quite different. If you are the only user of that server you could throw in a USB pen drive, boot from that and put four 4TB drives in it to hold 16TB of data. But if you want something redundant and with decent performance when multiple people try to access the server the answer will be quite different. – Hennes Feb 10 '13 at 21:41
  • I'm not sure who down voted me but I think my question is being misunderstood. Is there a limit (besides what I can find in the market for enterprise hard drives) to how much my RAID controller can handle. In the specs it says it can only handle 3TB but from what I'm gathering it seems people could do more. – Gabriel Graves Feb 11 '13 at 01:22
  • I did not down vote you but I think others are down voting you b/c you didn't really include enough technical details, so your question sounds overly broad. I just answered the portion that I understood you were asking and your follow-up made what you were asking more clear, so I amended my answer to include the additions. – slm Feb 11 '13 at 02:13
  • Which RAID controller do you have in your PowerEdge 2900? Have you contacted Dell to ask them what the maximum capacity is? It's possible that larger disks were not on the market when you purchased your server, or perhaps the server and/or RAID controller requires a firmware update to handle larger drives. – rob Feb 11 '13 at 02:20
  • I will say that it would be nice to remove this "closed as not a real question" as you can see that it is a real question that has been answered and just needs a better description. – Gabriel Graves Feb 11 '13 at 07:57

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Here are a couple of websites that offer RAID calculators. I use these to get a rough idea of how much space I'll have with various RAID configurations.

NOTE: Remember that this is the total space available after portions of it have been substracted out for use by the RAID. You'll still be losing more depending on which filesystem you lay on top of the RAID.

1. icc-usa RAID Calculator

                              ss of raid calc #1

2. Synology RAID Calculator

ss of raid calc #2

NOTE: The 2nd one is nice because it let's you mix and match different sizes of HDDs into the RAID.

Maximum size of RAID?

I don't see why you'd be limited. The only limiting factors are the number of physical drives you can fit in the Dell 2900 (space plus open SATA ports), and the speed of the SATA bus (3Gb/s vs. 6Gb/s). Currently I don't think there are any 6Gb/s RAID controllers that the 2900 supports so that doesn't matter here. When adding the disks if they're > 2TB you have to set them up using GPT not MBR!

Resources

slm
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