[Solved] 8 1tb drives Raid 10

"Assuming your RAID controller supports booting off of partitions larger than 2 TB, you should be fine. I looked in the manual and I believe it does. "

This isn't really related to the Raid bios, it would be the sysboards bios which would need to be UEFI to allow booting to drives greater then 2tb.

"I would do RAID slightly different than you are thinking. I'd use RAID 0 on four RAID 1 arrays instead of RAID 1 on two RAID 0 arrays. "

From Wiki: RAID 0+1: striped sets in a mirrored set (minimum four disks; even number of disks) provides fault tolerance and improved performance but increases complexity.
The key difference from RAID 1+0 is that RAID 0+1 creates a second striped set to mirror a primary striped set. The array continues to operate with one or more drives failed in the same mirror set, but if drives fail on both sides of the mirror the data on the RAID system is lost.
RAID 1+0: (a.k.a. RAID 10) mirrored sets in a striped set (minimum four disks; even number of disks) provides fault tolerance and improved performance but increases complexity.
The key difference from RAID 0+1 is that RAID 1+0 creates a striped set from a series of mirrored drives. The array can sustain multiple drive losses so long as no mirror loses all its drives.

Take your pick on that one, both have +/-

"I do not recommend attempting what the previous poster is suggesting. Most Hardware RAID devices (From what I've seen and I have 3 Areca RAID controllers) won't let you use 200 GB from you drives and then use the rest for a second drive. Create the arrays as one large drive. You should be able to use Windows Server 2008 to partition the drive as GPT (Don't use MBR). You should be able to create a 200 GB partition at the beginning and then a second partition that uses the rest of the drive space."

Virtual drives are becoming more and more common, however if the controller won't allow it, which I thought it did from reading the manual, it's not really an option. It may be worth getting two smaller drives with a Raid 1 set for the OS, and the 8 x 1tb drives for storage. It's not generally a great practice to run the OS/Storage on the same sets regardless of if you can get it working that way. No need to run Server OS to format a drive as GPT, Win 7 will handle that. If he creates the array as one large drive Windows will only allow using the first 2tb of drive space, and installing to that. Even after you get Windows loaded you will not be able to use the remainder of the space formatted as GPT as you can't have mbr/gpt on the same disk.