Storage ME5024 - Pool, Raid

The ME5 supports up to two Pools which always means a collection of disks. Each pool will assign to one controller module. This mean if you only create one Pool because you have only a small number of disks than this controller will do all the work and pushing the data and the 2nd. one will just sits there and waiting for a failover event.

So you have to do simple math first what happens if you spilt your 13 disks into half and based on the choosen protection level (aka RAID) and maybe a hotspare drive what would be left and does the space meets your requirements about your 5.5TB volume.

The world will not stop spinning if you assign all 13 disks to Pool "A".

The world will not stop spinning if you doesnt have the right number of disks combined with your RAID level and if you violence the "power of two" rule. You only will loose performance. But with the selected 10K spinning disks instead of SSDs performance was not at first place i think.

The ME5 can support 2 different modes called "Virtual" or "ADAPT".  Read the manual about .... because we deal with 2.5" (ssd) drives rather than 20TB disk i choose the "Virtual" mode together with a RAID5 or 6.

So i can only speak for the virtual mode right now:

1. You can create multiple volumes within such a Pool. So archiving your goal about having a smaller drive c: and a larger one for data is no problem
2. These volumes can be expand later. So you can start "small"
3. But even when creating the 5.5 one from start it will be a thinprovisioning one which means it will fill over the time and not from the beginning
4. You should consider the use of snapshots* and please take notice that the needed space comes on top. So you schould start small and not provisioning all available space

* The Snapshot handling will be a big step backwards compared to the SC. But that will only my humble opionen.

Regards,
Joerg