Hello wodz, Here are the answers to your questions. 1) Yes if for some reason that you lose connection to both EMM on #1 MD1000 then you will lose connection to your second MD1000. Also if you were to power off MD#1 then the same thing will happen that you will lose connection to MD#2 2) There is some bottle necking that will occur but the amount depends on the virtual disk that you are creating. If you were to have a virtual disk that spans between both MD1000 then you can have a large bottle neck depending on the data that will be on the virtual disk. 3) There is always a risk when doing any changes to your PERC card, but with that being said the risk is normally low as long as there are no issues with your PERC card & it is in a healthy state. Dell recommends that you have a valid test backup when making any changes to your MD just in case something goes wrong. In most cases you shouldn’t have any issues but with that said if it was me I would do a backup just in case as you can always delete the backup if not needed. 4) Yes you will see 2 different luns being presented to the bios & windows. If you wanted to just add the space from MD2 to MD1 then yes you will need to use diskpart or some utility to extend the volume via windows to see the total space.  5) No a SATA drive cannot be direct connected to the backplane in the MD1000, as you will need to get an interposer card to connect on the back of the sata hard drive. The drive carriers are the same for SAS & SATA drives. Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Hello,  I have a few questions that an expert should be able to answer quite easily regarding stacking MD1000 units.  We currently have 1 MD1000 connected to a PERC 6 card with 2 SAS cables.  We are looking to daisy chain a second MD1000 unit from the first unit.  We already know that this is possible and this is not part of our questions.  1) As the second unit is solely connected through the first MD what happens to the connectivity of MD2 if MD1 was to fail?  The same question applies if MD1 was suddenly turned off. Would MD2 lose connection with the PERC card?  We believe the answer is yes but we are looking for confirmation.  2) Both MD units will be full of SATA drives but the second question pertains to SAS throughput bottle necking.  With two MD units connected to 1 PERC6 card would there be an inherent bottleneck occurring?  Would the entire setup be slower since the PERC SAS controller is being dragged down by two units as opposed to one?  3) While in the PERC BIOS we will be creating a second VD is there any risk to the existing data on MD1? Is there any valid reason that we should have a full backup before attaching and configuring the second unit?  We want to ensure that we can connect and configure MD2 without any risk to MD1.  4) Both MD units are being controlled by the single PERC controller but they would show as two separate LUN's in the BIOS?  Would these two units show as one or two volumes in Windows Server?  We are looking to have Windows see only 1 if possible so that we can create one gigantic volume.. regardless of GPT limitations we are curious as to how MD1+MD2 would show up in Windows.  On a secondary question if the MD1 volume already exists in Windows how would the MD2 mix into that?  Would it simply show up as additional space that we need to diskpart?  5) Can a SATA drive be directly connected to the back plane or is an interposer required? (we have not tested this). To be more specific, If we place a SATA drive into a SAS caddy and install the drive.. will that work or is the interposer helping back plane communication to help the MD understand SAS emulation?  My apologies for so many questions but we want to be very careful.  We already have 11TB of live data and need to migrate 30TB more into the mix and losing data is not an option.  Backing up 11TB+ is not easy so we want to know as much information as possible before proceeding.  Thank you to anyone who has experience with any of these topics and can provide sound guidance (not opinions).
Second MD1000 questions