Problem configuring RAID 5 with Windows Server 2008
I have 8 1TB Drives in my machine, set up as RAID 5 The raid controller is a 3ware 9650 SE 8LPML http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9650.asp
I'm not sure if its important, but the mainboard is: http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=472
As far as i know, i've configured a 6TB array - in the menu when i pressed ALT + 3 during the boot phase.
I then tried to install Windows Server 2008 on this, to no avail It said it couldn't see any drives etc... I tried a few drivers, none of them worked. All said invalid drivers.
Eventually, I gave up, and installed Windows Server 2003 x64 - which, after messing about with drivers and a usb floppy drive, went in ok.
However - i could only see the volumes in the device manager -> disk management thing, and even then, they were split into 2 or 3 chunks.... Is this something to do with converting to GPT? if so... how do i do that?
My problem is, I would really like to install Windows Server 2008 Anyone have any idea as to what driver i need? Is it a problem with my BIOS or this 3ware raid controller?
Alex-
Are you trying to boot to the 6TB array or just use it as a data volume? You would need to partition it with a Guid Partition Table (GPT) in order to address that much space, and you can only boot to a GPT volume if you are using EFI instead of a legacy BIOS (not sure what that Tyan board has... EFI is still pretty uncommon). Some more information here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT-on-x64.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx
You shouldn't be using RAID 5 except as a last resort. http://www.baarf.com/ is a short read or look at some of these links.
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/2006/0731stor1.html
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/2006/0731stor2.html
First if the server needs good uptime you probably want two drives reserved for a RAID 1 array for the C: drive. If you have room to put in additional drives they don't need to be the 1TB drives you have for the data array. Anything 73GB or larger would be fine.
Assuming you had two smaller drives for the RAID 1 array and still had 8 drives left you could do RAID 10 with 8 drives for 4TB of storage, TWO raid 5 arrays of 4 drives each for 6TB of storage, or One RAID 6 array for 6TB of storage.
Assuming you use two of the 1TB drives for the RAID 1 array and only have 6 drives left you could do a 6 drive RAID 10 for 3TB, 5 drive RAID 5 with a hot spare for 4TB, or 6 drive RAID 6 for 4TB.
No matter what you should not be trying to use 8 drives in a RAID 5 array with no hot spares giving you 7TB of space. That is just asking for trouble.
Once you get away from trying to install windows on the RAID 5 array I think you'll probably find its a lot easier to get windows up on the RAID 1 and then deal with the data array(s) separately.
To answer you question about it being split up into multiple volumes see this link
While NTFS can support volumes greater than 2TB there are other limiting factors. The important bit from that article is this:
For now, 2 terabytes should be considered the practical limit for both physical and logical volumes using NTFS.