AMD RAIDXpert works with 2TB drives, NOT with 3TB Drives?

[docBrian]

Hello,

Maybe someone has a solution:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H (AMD 890GX chip set), rev 3.1, firmware F5H.

2TB drives: Hitachi Green
3TB drives: Western Digital Green

What works: Configure a 6-drive RAID 0 array in BIOS with (6) Hitachi 2TB drives. Boot into Win7x64. Windows device manager recognizes a 12TB RAID 0 array labeled "AMD 6+0 Stripe/RAID0 SCSI Disk Device". Format it as a GPT volume. No problems.

What doesn't work: Connect (5) Western Digital 3TB drives to the same SATA ports as above (leaving one empty). Configure a 5-drive RAID 0 array in BIOS on the (5) Western Digital 3TB drives. Boot into Win7x64. Windows device manager sees five discreet disk drives labeled "WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0 SCSI Disk Device"

 

[FireWire2]

With 2TB after configured RAID0, it shows as 12TB <-- correct setup
With 3TB after configured RAID0, it shows "nothing" <-- incorrect setup.

Need to make sure there is 15TB RAID0 in the BIOS before you can see under Windows

 

[mightymaxio]

Why you would want to Raid 0 x6 hard drives is strange. Unless you want a giant scratch disk to do photo editing, rendering, data processing using only SSD's for speed. Raid 0 with that many drives is like saying ok I want to go 1 month and lose all my data because of the raid.

At least raid 5 it man, you lose one drive and you don't lose everything lol.

Otherwise you will be on here two months from now with a single failed drive and dumbfounded why you didn't at least make a raid 5 because now you have no data.

 

[docBrian]

You ask a good question.

Why a 12TB RAID 0 Partition?

Performance!!! Minimal down time!!!

I'm a database developer, in the clinical business intelligence area, and I work with very large databases.

I ran extensive benchmarks before choosing my current configuration, which is three servers -- one 6-drive, 12TB RAID-0 based primary, and two 6-drive, 12TB RAID 0-based hot failover servers.

Here's why:

The 6-Drive RAID 0 array runs at 600 to 700 MBytes/sec throughput.

The same hardware configured as RAID 5 drops throughput to 100MBytes/sec at best. Worse -- if a drive in the RAID 5 array fails, the array takes almost a day to rebuild from the parity stripes in the remaining drives after the spare drive is activated. I can't afford that amount of downtime.

One of my database analyses takes about 2 hours to complete on the RAID 0 array, and about 12 to 13 hours to complete on the RAID 5 array. It's way cheaper for me to invest in 12TB of RAID 0 hard drives with hot failovers instead of 12TB of RAID 5 SSD storage.

RAID 5 is good in theory, but sucks, performance-wise and recovery-wise, in the real world of big datasets.

At least, that's been my experience.

 

[docBrian]

I did setup the 5-drive array in BIOS. The BIOS correctly recognizes a 15TB RAID zero array on boot, but Windows doesn't. The only difference is that the problem occurs with 3TB drives, not with 2TB drives.

With 2TB after configured RAID0, it shows as 12TB <-- correct setup
With 3TB after configured RAID0, it shows "nothing" <-- incorrect setup.

Need to make sure there is 15TB RAID0 in the BIOS before you can see under Windows

 

[mightymaxio]

Then heres another question, why use pure software raid? Not hardware raid? You will get better throughput and you have less of a chance of failure if running a hardware raid since it handles caching, and disk spinup differently.