span/stripe? 4x1TB

[gaspah]

Ok, i'm so foolish, i bought 4x1tb drives to run in raid5 on my ICH8R.. but that has a 2TB limit

so i go... ah thats ok... you can run raid5 on XP... im sure you can with vista... wrong...

so now im left with the idea of either a raid10 (doesnt sit well having a 1.8tb volume for 4x1tb drives) or Spanning a 3.75TB volume or Striping a 3.75TB volume...

my question is if i lose 1 drive from a SPAN volume am i going to be able to recover the data from the other 3 drives??? assuming i keep the drive defraged??? or should i just go with a STRIPE volume and gain a performance boost i dont really need??

unless somebody has a solution to get software raid5 running in vista.... that'd be heaps better.

i cant go for a hardware raid card as all my PCIe lanes are used (16x/16x slot 8800GTX and the 16x/4x slot with my areca arc-1220 running 8x400GB raid5)

yeah thanks anyone that helps...

i meticulously backup my data all the time.. so the recovery isnt data critical, moreso its quicker to recover off a hdd than off hundreds of DVDR

 

[gaspah]

If I install Windows Server 2008... for the RAID5 feature... am i still going to be able to use all the features of Vista that i've grown so attached too??? i'd move back to XP.... NOT... I'm running 8GiB and I aint going to Server 2003 or XP64.... so Server 2008... GOOD IDEA????

 

[nitrobass24]

I run Server2008 on a box and I like it...you cant even tell that its not vista I enable wifi, themes, added Superfetch.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"BootId"=dword:00000039
"BaseTime"=dword:0d1b1c35
"VideoInitTime"=dword:0000000f
"EnableSuperfetch"=dword:00000003
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003
"EnableBootTrace"=dword:00000000

Works just the same as my vista box but it has Hyper-V which cool to try things on, and makes it easy to thinstall my apps.

 

[Thuleman]

Why do you need a Raid5 partition that is larger than 2TB?
Just create the first partition at some smaller size, and then it will let you add an additional partition for whatever space is left. Problem solved.

I run Server2008 on a box and I like it...you cant even tell that its not vista I enable wifi, themes, added Superfetch.

Works just the same as my vista box but it has Hyper-V which cool to try things on, and makes it easy to thinstall my apps.

Except there are any number of apps which will not run in Windows 2008 Server because they are not made/licensed to run on a server OS.

That's not a deal-breaker for many, but just something to be aware of. AFAIK Server 2008 doesn't support software Raid5 either, so that really wouldn't help the OP too much.

 

[gaspah]

Why do you need a Raid5 partition that is larger than 2TB?
Just create the first partition at some smaller size, and then it will let you add an additional partition for whatever space is left. Problem solved.

not quite.. if this was a 32-bit windows problem, id do that... but the ICH8R only allows a total of 2TB for all volumes on a single array...

 

[gaspah]

I run Server2008 on a box and I like it...you cant even tell that its not vista I enable wifi, themes, added Superfetch.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"BootId"=dword:00000039
"BaseTime"=dword:0d1b1c35
"VideoInitTime"=dword:0000000f
"EnableSuperfetch"=dword:00000003
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003
"EnableBootTrace"=dword:00000000

Works just the same as my vista box but it has Hyper-V which cool to try things on, and makes it easy to thinstall my apps.

i think i'm going to look into running Server 2008, despite finding out it does not support software Raid-5 I'm sticking with JBOD inside windows...

JBOD is SAFER that RAID-0 right? right?? if one drive dies i can recover the rest right??

 

[tmclaugh]

NEGATIVE! To the best of my knowledge JBOD takes all four HDs and makes it into one. Think of when you defrag your HD in windows and see the pretty blocks moving about as they are organized. One drive dies and you will lose that portion. If anyone knows more, feel free to post a disagreement with information on how I am wrong. I would like to know. I would not risk it for now though.

On another note I used to use Windows 2003 Server as a gaming machine, the only thing that sucked was finding antivirus software to run on it. Now I'm using Windows 2003 Server as my home server.

What kind of HDs do you have? I had WD 4000YRs and they ALL DIED! I replaced two as they went out, then the third went out so I RMA'd it. While the shipment was delayed I kept running my PC (not thinking) and the last drive died...

Calling Drivesavers and shelling out that mad cash. I am keeping one drive in reserve from now on, so the array can instantly rebuild. I'm also staying away from WDs drives, no offense to people who trust WD but all four server class drives failed within two years...

In the end - I recommend keeping one in reserve - thus having two terabytes with extra redundancy. Not four gigs worth but it's safer, as well as working with windows XP.

 

[ilkhan]

Just run them as seperate drives. You said you do backups so drive loss isnt a huge deal, you keep a drives worth of space thatd go to parity is R5, and its easier to setup. Unassign all but your boot drive letters in storage manager and nest each drive inside of the boot drive. Easy, and how many single directories do you have >1TB anyway?

Or spend the extra few bucks for a RR2320. Its software based but can do >2TB setups (my 4 drives are 2.25TiB, 1.97TB in windows IIRC), gets around the OS issue and is plenty fast for most things.

And mobo RAID is weak (board dies your data goes with it. Almost worst case with an addin card is you have to replace the card. [actual worst case is it dies by writing bad data, but a mobo could do that too] If the card dies replace it, resetup the array an your data should be fine)

 

[Thuleman]

And mobo RAID is weak (board dies your data goes with it.

I am not a fan on mobo raid either, but I think that it's fair to say that the data is not lost if the mobo dies. All you need is a board with the same raid chipset (ICH-whatever) and you are back in business.