# Understanding logical drive configuration

When you create an array, you group physical 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 is displayed to the operating system as a single physical 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.

For the ServeRAID-8i controller you can configure a maximum of 128 logical drives. For the ServeRAID-7t controller, you can configure a maximum of 24 logical drives.

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.

## Limitations to consider

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

## More information

- Selecting the logical drive size
- Selecting the RAID level by array capacity
- Example: Logical drive configurations
- Creating logical drives (action)
- Configuring RAID and creating arrays (action)
- Creating logical drives in the wizard

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