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We just got a brand new HP DL370 G6 server with 14 X 146 gb and 2 X 300 gb sas drives.

Inside we got 3 raid controllers (one HP DL370, one HP P410 and one HP P812).

It has 2 disk bays and each of them is full. There are 4 cables that come out of them and go into the controllers. And i've connected them to the P410 and P812 array controllers.

The server will be used as the central server for our ERP.

I want to do the raid arrays like this:

  • 1 X raid 1 from 2 small hdds (operating system)
  • 1 x raid 1 from 2 small hdds (tempdb)
  • 1 x raid 10 from 4 small hdds (database files)
  • 1 x raid 10 from 4 small hdds (database logs - on another controller from the one above)
  • 1 x raid 1 from 2 large hdds (backups, etc).

I want to have 2 hotspares (one for each controller, except the big drives raid).

My question is: can I assign some drives as hot spare from one controller to be a hot spare even for the other controller? Or as a global hot spare for all the controllers?

2 Answers 2

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I'm a HP-geek, you don't want to do it like that at all, here's how;

  1. Throw away the P410, connect all disks to the P812.
  2. Create two arrays, one RAID 10 array from the 14 x 146GB disks and a second RAID 1 from the 2 x 300GB disks. Assign one of the 146GB disks as a hot-spare to the first array.
  3. Create logical disks from each array; LUN 1 at whatever size for boot disks, LUN 2 at whatever size for tempdb - carry on like this, basically let the array manage itself and don't worry about logical disk sizes matching physical disk sizes, it's not important, although obviously the backup disks will come from a single ~300GB second array so there's a limit to how you'll carve this up.

Is that clear? basically all the 146GB disks are in one big R10, backups are from a R1 array and use the P812 to just logically carve up the drives - it's easy and why you pay so much for the P812, let it do your work for you :)

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  • Thank you for your answer. But for sql server isn't better to use 2 controllers? I was asked to do that by the ppl that created our erp.
    – George
    Mar 17, 2011 at 21:17
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    Not in this case no .
    – Chopper3
    Mar 17, 2011 at 22:51
  • @Chopper3 Hi.I have also 4 controllers on DL580G7:P410i, LSI9261, P812, P410.After adding last two or one OS started to crash. Eliminating last two helped. But I need them: I have 6 cages (each with 4 HDDs) and enclosure D2700 (20 HDDs).P812 see only D2700 via external port - therefore I can't connect cages to P812 and use additional controllers.Each handles 2X4 HDDs via internal controller port. All of controllers share the same IRQ - 10 and trying to change IRQ of one controller automatically changes others to new IRQ (in RBSU). P812 and P410 has ROM v 6.62 and P410i has v 6.40. How to fix?
    – Vlad
    Jun 3, 2021 at 22:15
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You can't assign "global hotspares" across controllers.

Spanning the workload across two controllers is not a bad idea. I would go with the P410 and P812 only though. I would however strive to get as many drives as possible in each array, which is why I would forget about the hotspares. Using RAID-1 and RAID-10, you don't have a need for the hotspare. We have more than 500 HP servers of various models (5.000+ drives). We have raid-10 arrays spanning more than 24 drives, and not a single hotspare configured on ANY of our servers. Been doing this for almost 10 years. Never lost an array due to "missing hotspare".

Just my 2 cents :)

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