I bought a HP Proliant gen8 microserver. In it I installed 1 * 500GB SSD connected to SATA port 5 as a bootable disk and 4 * 3TB HDD connected to a HP smart array p212.
What I would like to do is create 1 array using HDD 1 and 2 as a RAID 1 configuration. The other hard drives will contain data that does not need mirroring and may be in a RAID 0 configuration, one array for HDD 3 and one array for HDD 4. This would become array A (RAID HDD 1 and 2), array b (RAID 0, HDD 3) and array c (RAID 0, HDD 4). I was able to do this on the soft RAID functionality. But using that also introduced other issues.
My issue is that I do not get the posibility for creating array c. It will let me create array a and array b. And it will show me that HDD 4 is a unassigned disk. In the image below you can see that the 'create array' button is gone.
I am able to create array A and array B both in RAID 1 and use all 4 HDD's. So connecting to all drives is not an issue.
Could the fact that I am not using any cache memory on the p212 card be the issue? From what I understand this would mainly upgrade your throughput of read and write data.
If I do need this RAM module, do I realy need a backup battery to get it operational like the seller for the card is telling me? From what I understand the battery is only needed in case of a power outage and it is not mandatory. From a risk perspective I am willing to take the risk of power outage because I would not mind if some data gets scrambled since this system would be a backup for photo's on mobile devices. The other data on the RAID 0 disks are more of a 'nice to have' nature, so data loss on those disks wouldn't matter anyway.
Thanks in advance.