We currently have a PET410, Windows Server 2008 Std, SP2, with a PERCS300 controller.
The server was shipped with a RAID5 volume 3 ea 250 GB drives,with R/W caching.
I now have 3 1 TB drives after I rebuilt the array.
One of the drives recently went out, and this corrupted the startup registry on the volume.
I replaced the drive, and was able to repair the registry, and boot the server. The array volume would not rebuild until the OS was loaded. While the volume was rebuilding, a second drive flashed orange and the array failed. I lost the server again at that point.
In my experience full hardware RAID controllers will be able to rebuild the array without the OS, and generally survive drive crashes (seems to me to be one of the primary reasons for using RAID).
So I am looking for recommendations for a new hardware with cache RAID controller for this server.
Can someone please recommend what would work best and provide good reliability for a RAID 5 aray with at least 3 1TB drives? Also. I believe the backplane on this server will support up to 6 drives. Could I add a drive to this RAID 5 array in the future?
Thanks