R5 sucks for that use case imho. Almost all (I say almost s I presume there are some that don't, but I haven't had any) SAS cards support SATA drives.
Backup the data and remove the existing sata card, then use the sas card for all of it, pending it has internal connectors? Model number of new card? From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org] Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 11:27 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: What would YOU do? Background: A %nightjob% client (17 employees) of mine has a Dell PowerEdge 840 with 4 SATA drives, two volumes of RAID1 (2x250GB for C: and D: , 2x500GB for E:) OS is SBS 2003 and they use SQL in addition to Exchange (when I spec'd this in 2007, SQL wasn't involved). I have split up Exchange / SQL Log/DB files as best I can. This has been working OK but they app that uses SQL is kind of a pig and it and Exchange create a lot of disk contention. I got the bright idea to have them buy $600 of 15K RPM SAS drives and an external enclosure and is bundled with a SAS RAID5 card (PCIe 4x - this is important for later...). I figured I'd create a RAID5 volume and point SQL over to this new drive array and performance should be much improved, my theory being is the system will be as fast or faster pre-SQL (my thinking was I might be able to move some other things off the SATA drives and onto the faster controller/disks). The mistake: Parts are onsite, and tonight I go to install the RAID card and....heeeeey, this system has ONE PCIe 8x slot and ONCE PCIe 1x slot, plus some standard PCI slots. Populating the PCIe 8x slot is a SAS 5/iR controller hooked to the four SATA drives. In other words, the shiny new toy I had them purchase won't work because I had assumed the existing RAID controller was built-in. It hadn't occurred to me as a remote possibility that there would be insufficient slots, I hadn't added a thing to this server since they'd bought it. What would you guys do? Send the hardware back and plead mea culpa? Is there any way to put the existing SATA array on a different card (say, a PCIe 1x SATA RAID card) without having to rebuild the volumes? I've looked for SAS RAID5 PCIe 1x (yes, it would be slower than 4x but still better than the stiff internal) but no luck. Maybe I'm over thinking this after a 17hr day (between %dayjob% and %nightjob%), but I welcome your guys' input. David Lum Systems Engineer // NWEATM Office 503.548.5229 // Mobile 503.267.9764 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
