Images as promised. Sorry these are a little large (in dimensions, not kb).

Physical disks - note that only Physical Disks 0:1 and 0:2 are presently used.

Virtual disks - system and space - note how both reside together on Physical Disks 0:1 and 0:2.

These appear as separate disks to Windows.

I want to move the "space" virtual disk onto the new drives, preferably as a RAID5 array.

There is no migration option.

You're looking at the following steps:

- back up the data

- update all the drivers, firmware and bios on the server

- make an image-based backup of your diag partition, C-drive and D-drive

- destroy the existing raid setup

- in the PERC bios, create your new raid setup (maybe a raid 1 for the diagnostic partition and the C-drive and then a raid 5 on the 3 new disks (single virtual disk per raid set!))

- restore the diagnostic partition and then the C-drive (if your software (restore) allows it, let the C-drive use the whole disk)

- restore the D-drive to the second raid virtual disk

I was fearing that I might have to make an image of the D: drive, but of the C: drive, too?!

I was kinda expecting that if I backed up the D: and then deleted the virtual disk that it resides on, I would be able to then expand the C-drive's virtual disk (and then, in Windows, expand the partition on it) to fill the existing array.

No?  :emotion-6:

I was thinking to restore the D: drive to a RAID5 just as you said.

From what I've seen you can't expand a virtual disk to include unused space on the raid set, but on another thread someone posted that they were able to do it (I just never have been able to do it).

Hi
      I am about to setup a new R710 server in which I have 2 physical disks. I wanted to know if there is any benefit of creating 2 virtual disks (just as your setup, 1  for system and apps and 1 for data). After a lot of search on google, I found your article.

Please let me know your opinion/suggestions. I am looking for a better read performance.

Thanks in advance

I am about to setup a new R710 server in which I have 2 physical disks. I wanted to know if there is any benefit of creating 2 virtual disks (just as your setup, 1  for system and apps and 1 for data). After a lot of search on google, I found your article. Please let me know your opinion/suggestions. I am looking for a better read performance

Well, if you actually read the thread, mate, you'd see that the decision to use multiple virtual disks caused me only grief. Why do you think it would improve performance?

I made this decision partly out of inexperience, but also because the PowerEdge 2800 used SCSI disks which were (as I recall) relatively expensive at the time. Certainly drives for that system are now secondhand the same price as a new SATA drive 10x or even 50x the capacity. I have a feeling that when we bought them new they were just a little prohibitive in pricing.

You have 8x drive bays. Stick more disks in. You can use Standard SATA drives in your R710, and you can buy the caddies from 3rd-parties for about $50. Use RAID0 (no redundancy) or RAID01 / RAID10 (redundancy, more disks required) for read speed, maybe RAID1 for the system partition. Consider SSDs.

"I explain this in detail because I spoke earlier to a guy from Dell server support and he seemed surprised it was possible to configure the drives this way"

Actually I have come in on a few servers which inexperienced users set up a raid 5 and a  raid 1 on the same 3, 4 or 5 disk array, making both arrays very vulnerable as either the raid 5's or raid1's failure took down both volume;, used to be possible to created more then two raid arrays on a physical set of disks (total insanity). We are talking over 10 years ago.

" I am about to setup a new R710 server in which I have 2 physical disks. I wanted to know if there is any benefit of creating 2 virtual disks (just as your setup, 1  for system and apps and 1 for data). After a lot of search on google, I found your article.

Years ago with older hard drive technology, the answer would be yes. New drives and controllers have cache, provide elevator seeks, command queuing etc. , which would basically negate this. Under certain circumstances a minuscule benefit would occur, but not more then if (2) OS base partitions were used instead of creating multiple volumes.

 As a note, if you defrag your arrays daily, including  purchasing a defrager which will defrag at boot time you get and added 5-7% performance boost; that percent considers you do a boot time defrag at least once a month.

Thanks a lot for your replies. I appreciate it.