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Hello, I bought an Adaptec 21610SA RAID card to create two raid sets on my system. I understand that each RAID logical volume can not exceed 2,000 GB / 2 Terabytes.

Before I buy my HDD's this question occurred to me...

My question is this. If I create a RAID 5 set with seven 320 GB HDD drives in a RAID 5 configuration, am I exceeding the limitations of the Adaptec 21610SA?

Note: I am asking this because in a RAID 5 configuration six drives are used for striping for a logical drive size of 1,920 GB and the seventh drive is used for Parity. The seventh drive means 2,240 GB of hard drive space is being used and I am wondering if this exceeds the specifications of the Adaptec 21610SA.

Thanks in advance, just trying to avoid a "gotch-ya"

Rubberman

Why do you think that? This was true a LONG time ago (in internet years).
Probably not. If you are using RAID-5 then you only have 6 drives in effect. 6x320GB = 1980GB
You aren't using 2240GB of drive space - only 1980. The other 320GB is parity data and should not impact the limits of the hardware. Even so, I suspect that this controller won't have problems with larger arrays, though this limitation might be relevant to WIndows systems prior to Vista. The drivers only support up to XP and XP-64bit. They do have drivers for RHEL 4, and with the ext3 file system, you have support for up to (I think) 16TB for a file system. Using LVM2, you can go far beyond that, to exabytes.

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PowrrrPlay

Rubberman, thank you for the post. Just trying to avoid a gotcha as it relates to the adaptec 21610sa and not the OS.

It is my understanding, regardless of the OS that the 21610SA has a RAID set limitation size of 2 terabytes. I certainly understand 32/64 bit OS limitation issues and LVM.

I need to focus on the "gotch-ya" as it may or may not relate to the 21610SA. Yes, I will be using a 64 bit linux OS. Yes I will be using LVM but I still want to efficiently design my RAID 5 set(s).

If the 21610sa does not have a 2 terabyte RAID set limitation when using a 64 bit OS then my question is a mute point. Otherwise you may have answered my question by stating that six drive striping is within the 21610sa limitations regardless of the parity drive.

On the other hand, if my original question regarding this card, if it is not relevant to 64 bit OS linux, that is most pleasing information. I only wish that Adaptec could publish clear statements.

Again, thank you for your thoughts. Do you know for fact that there is no technical problem/limitations having one raid set larger than 2 terabytes on a 64 bit linux OS with the Adaptec 21610SA?

Rubberman

No I don't. You might want to send an email to Adaptec tech support about that. I was reading thru their documentation on the product and saw nothing about the 2TB limit myself, but I could have missed it in all the other stuff. It certainly wasn't apparent though.

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