Hi All,

Dell PE R710, received from Dell in the following state :

Windows Disk 0 1800GB ( Volume C & D ) Windows Disk 1 526 GB (Volume E )

Perc6i Integrated Raid Controller 6 x 500GB Nearline SAS 7200RPM HDDs

Raid 5 Configuration with two Virtual Disks

I have installed Dell open Manage and it shows the following :

Virtual Disk 0 - State : Background Initialization ( 7% ) Virtual Disk 1 - State : Background Initialization ( 25% )

Now when I click on Virtual Disk 0 it shows me all 6 Disks and the same happens when I click on Virtual Disk 1 it displays all 6 disks.

But when I click on Storage > Perc6i > Connector 0 > I get 4 Physical disks with the following numbers :

Physical Disk 0:0:0 Physical Disk 0:0:1 Physical Disk 0:0:2 Physical Disk 0:0:3

When I click on Storage > Perc6i > Connector 1 > I get 2 Physical Disks Listed in the following way :

Physical Disk 1:0:4 Physical Disk 1:0:5

I am a little confused in this description, does this 1:0:4 interprets to Controller1, Disk4. Does this integrated raid card have two controllers coming out of it ?

Also, When I first switched on the machine, the boot partition was showing 1GB Available out of 40GB, now its showing 38GB available out of 40GB.

Is this because the Virtual Disks are still Initializing ? Any recommendations or suggestions ?

Also, this server have 6 x 500GB NearLine SAS Hard drives, what would be a good raid config ?

We are planning to use it for Hyper-V with quite a few (7 or 8) virtual servers, your suggestions would be helpful.

Also, while the virtual disks are in a initialization state, can I destroy and re-create the raid configuration ? I would have to do it at the BIOS CTRL-M ?

Thanks and Regards