DELL PERC 5/i RAID CARD

Can it emulate no-raid drive addressing?

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/p/18327220/18450283.aspx

Q: I want the 2950 with more than the four drive backplane, for future expandability, and having more spindles in this application is good. However, it looks like the native drive controller won't address more than four drives unless there's a raid controller. The onboard perc/5i raid controller can do raid 0, 1, etc.

I really don't need raid except to be able to populate the server with more drives; my real preference would be if the system could simply see six drives natively.

Does anyone know if I can basically set up the raid controller to see each drive individually? This is for a squid/cache server which has the OS on one drive, and cache on three (or eventually, more) other drives.

Raid 0 seems wrong since it stripes across drives, any one of which could go south and take down the entire server. JBOD mode, as I understand it, lets you use the raid system to see the totality of your drives as one big drive, which also seems wrong in my application.

A: It's simple really, just make several RAID 0 arrays, each one is a single physical drive, problem solved.

You cannot order it configured that way online, so just call in to our sales department, and have the sales person order the server with 1 drive RAID 0 configuration, and add the additional drives on seperate "tie" numbers. you'll get all the drives you need, you install the additional drives, and use the controller BIOS to create the RAID 0's on the additional drives, and have the factory installed O/S on the first drive. BTW the sales person may be able to give you configuration advice for your particular application.