RAID Larger than 2TB

[droidling]

I have initialized a RAID5 array with 6 750GB Seagate drives on a Rocketraid 2220 controller. The OS is windows 2000 server and is installed on a separate 80GB drive. The controller software shows the array size as 3.75TB, but disk manager only shows it as 2047.97GB.

I've done a lot of searching but there is a lot of conflicting information on the max size of a single volume. Is there any way I can get W2K to recognizes the full size of this RAID?

 

[ccb056]

Sorry for bringing up a dead post, but doing a search this is the only thing that came up.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/247709-32-raid5-array-promise-tx4310-seagates

I am also having the same issues.

 

[Ijack]

There has been a thread about this within the past couple of months, but I can't find it off hand. (The search facilities in these forums are very poor.) In brief, the options are:

Create multiple logical units less than 2TB in size, or

Use a GUID partition table.

 

[Pointertovoid]

Hi everybody!

The 2TB is the limit per disk (not per volume) of the MBR-type partition table. The answer would indeed be a GUID partition table (GPT) BUT Windows 2000 can't use it.

I had a deeper look at it and posted the result there:
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?act=ST&f=5&t=22779
don't waste time with the first posts, the information is in the last post but one (Sep 20 2008, 04:58 PM).

With Windows alone, you'd need at least Xp 64 bits or Server 2k3 sp1.

However, I read a turnaround for some Raid adapters only, which can cut the capacity of the Raid array in portions and let Windows believe these portions are physically distinct hard drives. Then, one may even W2k's software Raid to aggregate the full capacity to a single dynamic volume, if this is any useful.

The latter information was probably from the manufacturer's site of a Raid adapter.