Promise Technology EX8658, EX8654, EX8650, EX4650 manual Ranges of Disk Array Expansion, Pdm

SuperTrak EX Series User Manual

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 single- drive 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 16 physical drives. Other limitations might apply

Ranges of Disk Array Expansion

The 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 physical 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 PRO to expand a logical drive beyond the maximum expansion size. When the expansion is finished:

•WebPAM PRO 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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