What did I do wrong? (RAID 5)

[Darur]

Hi folks,

I recently set up my RAID 5 array with 3 500GB Seagate 7200.11 hard drives and something isn't working properly. The array shows up in Windows as being 465 GB and HD Tach gives me these results on the long Benchmark:

I can't figure out where I went wrong

I followed this guide and partitioned each drive with a Vista disc, Formatted each drive to 64KB in XP and set the stripe size for the drives to 32KB in RAID BIOS. The array is running on my DFI Lanparty UT NF590's RAID controller.

When I booted into Windows with the array set-up (currently running it on the side to test it out) it had me install drivers for each disk and then for the entire array and when it detected it on reboot, it required me to reformat the entire array.

What did I do wrong? I've been reading about how to set up the array for a while but this is my first time working with it. Many thanks to any help in advance!

 

[noegruts]

Hi folks,

I recently set up my RAID 5 array with 3 500GB Seagate 7200.11 hard drives and something isn't working properly. The array shows up in Windows as being 465 GB

Your HD Tach image shows it as 1000GB, as expected. Where exactly in Windows is it showing up as 465GB? A 1000GB volume will show up in Windows as 930GB because of this.

 

[Darur]

When I select the array in explorer and look at its properties it comes up at 465GB.

I noticed when I destroyed the array that one of the drives somehow wasn't initiated properly so I'm wondering if that might be the problem.

My biggest concern was why the array seemed to be so slow with those spikes in performance, the hard drives all performed faster when benched in HD Tach alone.

I'll hopefully be getting a Areca ARC-1220 card in a few weeks, so I'll wait till then and see if its still giving me problems.

 

[aja]

When you go to

control panel > admin tools > Computer management

Click disk management on the left

How does it show your RAID array? Does it show the full 1000gigs?

From there you can repartition if need be

 

[Darur]

Hey, pardon the bump but I didn't think I should make another thread for these quick questions:

I just set-up my RAID 5 array and used a 32KB stripe, with 3 500GB drives, should I have set that differently or should that be fine?

Also, I'm noticing I need to get Windows to initialize the array before I can use it. When I go through this it first asks me if I want to initialize the array and then it asks me if I want to convert it to a dynamic disk. Do I want to do both or just one or what? Sorry, just want to make certain I do this right.

 

[tuskenraider]

You'll be fine with 32K. Initialize the array, do not make it dynamic.

 

[Darur]

Thanks very much, tuskenraider!

 

[ratbuddy]

RAID 5 is really horrible on a mobo controller. I highly recommend going RAID 0 and backing up to the other drive once in a while, or getting an aftermarket card..

 

[Darur]

RAID 5 is really horrible on a mobo controller. I highly recommend going RAID 0 and backing up to the other drive once in a while, or getting an aftermarket card..

Right now I'm running my array off an Areca ARC-1220 controller, but I definitely agree its much better then the on-board controller I tried the first time around.