Dell 745N manual Disk and Volume Management, Drive Configurations, Managing Your Disks and Volumes

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Disk and Volume Management

Dell™ PowerVault™ 745N NAS Systems Administrator's Guide

Drive Configurations

Using Array Manager to Manage Disk Arrays

Disk Management

Managing Volumes Using Disk Management

Enabling and Disabling Hard Disk Write Cache on Software RAID NAS Systems.

This section provides information about how to manage your physical hard drives, arrays, and volumes.

Managing Your Disks and Volumes

Managing the disks and volumes depends on the storage configuration of your system. You use either Dell OpenManage™ Array Manager or the Microsoft® Windows® Disk Management tool to manage disks and volumes.

Software-RAID Configuration

To manage both disks and volumes, use the Windows Disk Management tool. See "Disk Management."

Hardware-RAID Configuration

To manage the hardware-RAID disks, use Dell OpenManage™ Array Manager. See "Using Array Manager to Manage Disk Arrays." To manage the hardware- RAID volumes, use the Windows Disk Management tool. See "Disk Management."

External Storage Configuration

To manage the internal software-RAID disks and volumes, use the Windows Disk Management tool. See "Disk Management." For the external storage hard drives, use the Dell OpenManage™ Array Manager to manage the disks and the Windows Disk Management tool to manage volumes. See "Using Array Manager to Manage Disk Arrays" and "Managing Volumes Using Disk Management."

Drive Configurations

The following subsections describe the three NAS system configurations:

•Software RAID — If your NAS system uses software RAID, see "Software-RAID NAS System Drive Configuration."

•Hardware RAID — If your NAS system uses hardware RAID, see "Hardware-RAID NAS System Drive Configuration."

•External Storage RAID — If your NAS system uses external storage RAID, see "External Storage NAS System Drive Configuration."

NOTE: For instructions on how to determine if you have a software-RAID or a hardware-RAID NAS system, see "Determining a NAS System's Configuration" in "NAS Manager."

Software-RAID NAS System Drive Configuration

The NAS system in a software RAID configuration contains four SATA hard drives. Each drive contains both a copy of the operating system and one or more data partitions. See Table 3-1 and Figure 3-1. Working copies of the Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system and boot sectors are installed on two hard drives that are in a RAID 1 mirrored configuration. An additional copy of the operating system is placed on the other two drives in RAID 1