RAID Issue

[Animal]

Hi guys,

I currently have a SIL 3114 4 port sata card with 4 x 750Gb drives in raid 5 but for some reason i cant get XP to see the drive.

Any ideas?

 

[K404]

Start->Run-> type compmgmt.msc-> storage-> Disk management (Local)

Is that whats missing?

 

[Animal]

click on screen shot 2 m8

 

[K404]

DOH! Sorry!

I know I should know this, but I cant remember!

 

[Animal]

you have had this before?

 

[K404]

I think so yea- iv had a few arrays seen but not seen...

It happened with my SCSI... gawd that was only a week ago Sorry Danny!

 

[Animal]

Well this is a first for me m8,

I really wish you could remember

 

[Wellcomef3-a]

Hey Animal, lets start by ruling a few things out.

Have you installed the drivers?

Have you enabled the hard drives in the BIOS?

Have you created the array correctly?

Are the data/power cables connected correctly and are they working correctly for that matter?

Are the hard drives themselves in good working order?

You have disabled the on-board controller in the BIOS if present?

Maybe try cleaning the contacts on the card and re-seating it.

Chew on these for a while and we'll soon narrow the problem down.

 

[Thor]

Have you initialised and formatted the drive/array?

 

[Animal]

Hi Guys,

sorry for not getting back but i solved it... for some reason windows couldnt see the totoal of over 2.2 TB when all 4 drives in raid 5 but if i done 3 drives it would see it?

 

[Wellcomef3-a]

Hey Animal, glad to hear you sorted it. I will have to remember this for future use.

Refresh my memory please, RAID-5 arrays use a minimum of 3 hard drives, yes?

 

[Thor]

Can XP not see drives that large then like some of the older versions?

 

[Wellcomef3-a]

Hi Guys,

sorry for not getting back but i solved it... for some reason windows couldnt see the totoal of over 2.2 TB when all 4 drives in raid 5 but if i done 3 drives it would see it?

So, doing the maths the total capacity of the entire array was 4 x 750GB which equals 3 TB before Windows could see the drives. Remove one of those 750GB drives and it leaves 2.25TB. So the other 50GB wasn't seen by Windows because of the way hard drive manufacturers calculate their hdd sizes. A kilobyte is really 1024 bytes, but they use the round figure of a 1000 bytes to represent 1 kilobyte instead which accounts for the discrepancy here of 50GB. Now that is a lot of bytes but when you're dealing with Tera-Bytes it soon gets swallowed up.

Lesson over now, LOL!