This sounds like it's not a Perl questions, but rather a database design issue. It sounds to me like you have a one-to-many relationship with each unit having one or more drives. To handle that, you should create a separate "drives" table with the key being the unique ID for the unit and the rest of the values being the information you want to insert for each drive:

Unit	Drive	State	Make/Model
1	drive00	in_service	SEAGATE
1	drive01	in_service	SEAGATE
2	drive00	in_service	SEAGATE
Et cetera...

You'll need to put a unique constraint on the Unit/Drive combination

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: D'oh! I missed the MySQL reference. Unfortunately, MySQL barely qualifies as a database, so you'll be limited in the constraints you can put on it.

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