so I have a fully populated MD1000 (15x 1TB disks) which I need to carve up for a for a file server that doesn’t need a lot of i/o performance but needs to make the most of the available capacity and still have some redundancy.
In case you’re wondering the file server is supporting a media network with full copies of uncompressed DVDs, Blurays, CDs etc. as well as the original unedited footage from a 1080p camcorder and the finished projects so the data quantities do add up quickly. There’ll be a max of 5 people accessing it concurrently.
To this end I’ve created 2 RAID 5 disk groups of 7 disks each and allocated the final disk as a global hot spare. The original thought was just to have 2x 5.5TB volumes in Server 2008 R2 but there are obvious issues with this so instead we want to go with 3 partitions on each of the disk groups based on the following simple math:
diskpart sees each disk group as 5586GB.
(5586 / 3) X 1024 = 1,906,688MB
diskpart is then able to create the first partition at this size fine. The partition reports correctly at 1862GB however the actual disk (list disk) now shows a remaining 186GB space rather than the 3724GB I’m expecting so that we can create the other 2 partitions. Obviously it then complains there’s not enough space.
As an experiment I’ve cleaned the disk, created a new primary partition of 2000mb (again, list partition reports the size correctly) but running list disk shows 2046gb remaining. Very odd.
Now I confess to the fact that having been a manager for the last 5 years it’s usually a bad idea for me to have my hands on the spanners however I’m feeling a little embarrassed I can’t get something so simple as this working.
I’m assuming that if under the 2TB mark the partitions / volumes would have been fine. Is this not the case if the actual physical disk is > 2TB? or am I missing something very simple when giving the create partition commands?
If it’s related to the physical disk size how would you suggest splitting the disks up?
Dell 2950 -> MD1000 (via PERC 5e)
Server 2008 R2 (core)
although coming from you today it’s a little rich :lol: