THG Pushes Broadcom's RAIDCore Storage Controller Envelope
An Obstacle For Partition Sizes: In Windows, A Maximum Of 2 TeraBytes
With 2,048 GB or 2 TB, we reached the maximum partition size that Windows with NTFS can manage on MBR (Master Boot Record). Switching to a dynamic drive will force Windows to use a database rather than the partition table, enabling partitions of up to 232 clusters (16 TB at 4 kB cluster size).
RAID 50 Necessary
For simplicity's sake, we wanted to create one single, large RAID 5 array with 32 drives. The Fulcrum architecture, however, supports a maximum of 16 drives per RAID 5 array. Therefore, we moved to RAID 0, which is not as stable.
In order to still gain a feeling for the performance in RAID 5, we also created a RAID 50, which connects two RAID 5 arrays with 16 drives, respectively (via striping).
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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.