RAID 5 not showing all capacity

Hi All,

I have a Abit AB9Pro motherboard and am doing on-board RAID with the 6 port Intel RAID controller

I was running a RAID 5 array with 3x1TB drives and all was well, it showed formatted capacity of 1.8TB as expected. Then I wanted to upgrade to 4x1TB drives hoping to get about 2.7TB of RAID 5 storage. So I went in to RAID utilty, deleted the old RAID volume then created the new volume with 4 drives, problem is that the RAID utility showed final capacity of only 2TB. Even after formatting the final volume was 1.99TB.

Any ideas? or is this a limit of my on-board, Intel RAID controller?

Hmm....it might be the limit of LBA....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing

I was reading on anandtech about difficulties booting from a 3TB drive, I'm thinking the intel controller is using LBA maybe?

*also* you may want to consider running RAID 10 for much better performance, I think you'll be dissapointed with onboard RAID 5.

it's not a boot drive, got a 500gb drive for that

You'll need to run a GPT partition table for greater than 2TB Support. Only supported in Vista and W7 (no XP Support). Either that or split it up into 2 partitions smaller than 2TB/ea

W7 and Vista ask you what partition type you want when you "initialize" teh disk. Choose "GPT" and you'll have access to all space in a single partition...