## Understanding logical drive configuration

When you create an array, you group hard disk drives into one storage area. You can define this storage area as a single logical drive, or you can subdivide it into several logical drives. Each logical drive displays to the operating system as a single physical hard disk drive.

The ServeRAID controller supports up to eight logical drives. If you have only one array, you can define it as a single logical drive, or you can divide it into several logical drives. Typically, the first logical drive that you define will be your startup (boot) drive. If you have two or more arrays, each array can be one logical drive, or you can divide each array into multiple logical drives, as long as the total number of logical drives for all of the arrays does not exceed eight.

If you do not define a logical drive for every array, the ServeRAID Manager will define a logical drive with the largest capacity and highest RAID level possible.

Note: Refer to the documentation provided with your operating system for information about the recommended logical-drive sizes.

Limitations to consider:

- You can have up to eight arrays on a controller.
- You can have up to eight logical drives on a controller.
- If any existing logical drives are defined as RAID level-5 Enhanced, you can only have seven logical drives on a controller.

### See also

Selecting the logical drive size
Selecting the RAID level by array capacity
Logical drive examples