Should I use dynamic volumes to overcome 2TB limit on basic disks.

[Jason_Kappy]

Hi Guys,
We have a Dell PowerVault 220S with 15 slots. We have 12*146Gig disks in RAID 5. I can upgrade this to 14*300GB. However I realized that Windows 2000 only supports 2TB for a single LUN. What is the best way to deal with this issue. Use 2 RAID 5 sets which will create 2 basic disks or create one RAID 5 set with dynamic disk. I never used dynamic disks before so I am kind of paranoid about gotchas. Also I am planning to create 64K file system cluster size in anticipation of faster disk-to-tape vaulting. Will this have any effect on they way netbackup works.

Thanks,
J.

[AKopel]

We use dynamic disks all the time with no issue.
Personally, I would split that big of a volume up anyways so it is easier to multistream in NBU. Also, if you ever need to do a chkdsk on it, it will be VERY painfull with one huge array.

[Chris_Colvin]

I explored using RAID to create a super volume on our SAN for backup, but then decided to create a Storage Group. NBU will then backup up to all of our 2TB disks, but if one of them has a problem I can remove it from the group or add more with little problem. The load balancing isn't as perfect as with RAID, but it's does seem to write each job to a different disk, spreading out the load.

We were worried about fragmentation problems on the RAID. It is easier for Diskeeper to defrag several smaller drives that one massive drive.