VessRAID Setup - Promise Technology, Inc.

VessRAID 1000i Series Product Manual
Ranges of Disk Array Expansion
The Windows 2000 and Windows XP (32-bit) operating systems support a
10-byte LBA format. As a result, these OSes can only recognize 4 billion
addresses. If you create a logical drive using the default 512 B sector size, the
logical drive will be limited to 2 TB of data, even if there is more space available
on your disk drives.
This limitation does not apply to Windows XP (64-bit), 2003 Server, Vista, and
Linux OSes with the 2.6 kernel. Linux OSes with the 2.4 kernel do not support
variable sector sizes, therefore you cannot apply the solution described here to
those OSes.
Note that once you create your logical drive, you cannot change the size of the
sectors. Nor can you increase the number of address blocks that the OS
recognizes.
You can direct WebPAM PROe to expand a logical drive beyond the maximum
expansion size. When the expansion is finished:
• WebPAM PROe will show the logical drive in the desired size.
• Your operating system might show the logical drive at the maximum size
listed in the table below.
• Additional capacity might appear as unpartitioned and unformatted.
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Important
• The Target disk array may require more physical drives than
the Source disk array
• If the Target disk array requires an EVEN number of physical
drives but the Source disk array has an ODD number, ADD a
physical drive as part of the migration process
• You cannot reduce the number of physical drives in your disk
array, even if the Target disk array requires fewer physical
drives than the Source disk array
• RAID 1 (mirroring) works with two drives only. Only a singledrive
RAID 0 disk array can migrate to RAID 1. Other RAID
Levels use too many drives to migrate
• You cannot migrate a disk array when it is Critical or
performing activities such as Synchronizing, Rebuilding, and
PDM
• For RAID 6 or RAID 60, you can only migrate between these
two RAID levels. Destination RAID 60 axles can have up to
32 physical drives. Other limitations might apply