I just installed WinServer 2012 Essentials on my EX490

I have 4 2TB HDDs on the box. How can I setup RAID5 on this server just incase a HDD craps out?

Thanks

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EX490
CPU E6550
8TB HDD's
2GB RAM

You should be able to do this through Disk Manager. The bottom disk (bay 0) should not be included. The disks in bays 1, 2 and 3 can be converted to Dynamic disks, and then you can create a new RAID-5 volume. If you do this, ideally you want the three disks to be identical -- same manufacturer, model, capacity, etc. If you cannot get three that are identical, at least try to match capacity and spindle speed. If you mix and match capacities and/or spindle speeds, you'll take a performance hit.

One drawback to Dynamic disks is that you cannot enable BitLocker Drive Encryption on them. If you want to use BitLocker to encrypt the data, I would recommend using either StableBit or Drive Bender to create your array, because you can still enable BitLocker on the individual disks. I haven't tested this with Storage Spaces. In general, I've found Storage Spaces perform slower than both StableBit and Drive Bender.

_________________
Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

So what happens if the OS disk dies? How will i be able to see my DATA or retrieve if I cant add the OS drive to the RAID?

_________________
EX490
CPU E6550
8TB HDD's
2GB RAM

If the OS disk dies, you'd reinstall Windows on another system disk. Then you'd go back to Disk Manager, and you'd see the three RAID disks showing up as Foreign. Right-click on any one of them, and select Import Foreign Disks. This brings up a dialogue where you can select all 3 disks. It'll import the disks and after a minute or two, the RAID array becomes available to you.

_________________
Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

You don't want to run 'Software' RAID5 - certainly not on drives that don't support TLER. It is better practise to understand what data is important and put that on a mirror set and then put the other data on a span (not strip) of the other disks. The trouble with RAID5 is it often breaks when you are rebuilding after a failure. However, if you have good backup methods and understand RAID is for fault tolerance not backup then go for it :-/