Good morning, The Perc 5/i will not see all the space on the 3TB drive. The maximum it will see is 2TB, so you will be wasting 1TB of space on each drive.  There is not a firmware upgrade to change this.  The single drive is probably setup as a RAID 0.  To add additional drives to this server, you can create more RAID 0's or an additional RAID, such as RAID 5 with the remaining  bays.  This controller will not allow a JBOD setup, so each drive has to be in some sort of RAID.. This can be configured in the Ctrl R bios during POST.  Regards,
I have a Poweredge 2900 that was given to me. It has a SATA hard drive with Windows 7 installed on it that it boots from. All 8 of the Raid bays are currently empty and im looking to fill them. Everything i have read states  the PERC 5i raid controller will only allow a 2TB HD pr slot. I want to find out if there is a way to Increase this to 3TB HD. Since its booting off a separate drive is there a way to get Windows 7 to see the individual drives with software? Or a different way to create a RAID 5 allowing me to use the larger 3TB HD? Please let me know if more info is needed or if anyone has any good ideas. My ultimate goal is to store media on this machine. Its not going to be used as an actual server but more to store pictures, music and movies.
Poweredge 2900 3TB HD addition