Sataraid5manager problem

[zom]

Hello,

I have a Sil3124r5 based card in an XPSP3 machine with four 2TB drives attached. The SATARAID5Manager sees all the drives OK as 1.81TiB drives.

I want to set up four 1860GB RAID5 groups from the drives, but the SATARAID5Manager wont let me.

I can make 2 TB groups but XP cant see them. I can make 1 TB groups, but the card is limited to four groups, so I waste 1.6 TB. I can make 999 GB groups, but I cant make 1860 GB groups because the SATARAID5Manager will only accept 3 digits before the GB.

The latest version of SATARAID5Manager for the 3132 card does allow 4 digits before the GB, but it doesnt work with the 3124 card.

Does anybody have any other ideas?

 

[FireWire2]

WinXP is 32 bit OS - It can access up to 2TB (in binary), beyond that it CAN NOT.

Dont waste your time, there is no way around that, unless you want to hack-it and use Windows XP software raid5 - which I would not recommend.

The best thing is move to XP64, or later OS

 

[zom]

WinXP is 32 bit OS - It can access up to 2TB (in binary), beyond that it CAN NOT.

Thanks for the response. I wish changing OSs was a possibility, but no.

XP can access more than 2 TiB quite easily, so long as each drive is less than ~1900 GiB in size.

My strategy in the past has been to have multiple <2TiB raid groups and combine them as dynamic drives into a single volume. It overcomes the XP ~2TiB drive limit, and gives RAID protection.

But now I have come across a piece of software by Silicon Image which seems to have been designed to prevent such a strategy in XP.

The problem I am having here is getting the SATARAID5Manager to do the right thing. The rest I can deal with as before.

I am trying to work out how to get the 3124 SATARAID5Manager version to allocate 1860 GB RAID Groups, like the 3132 version can. (1860 GB because it is a 1/3 of the possible RAID size)

It cant be a card BIOS limitation because it will allocate 2TB groups and larger. It just seems to be a SATARAID5Manager GUI limitation preventing more than 3 digits before the GB.

I have tried a number of ways to get the later SATARAID5Manager version to integrate with the earlier drivers and configuration service, without success.

My only chance here is that somebody has had the same problem before and found a solution, or can tell me there isnt one. Not much of a chance I know, but this forum seems to be the premier forum for such left field issues.

 

[zom]

Panic over.

I have found a way to make the later 3132 STARAID5Manager software interface with the earlier 3124 card.

Now I can (and did) create three 1863GB RAID5 arrays, make them into dynamic drives with XP, and span them into a single 5.45TiB (6TB) RAID5 protected volume.

Now I will see if I can find a way to gang multiple 3124 cards ......