Max HDD volume size in Windows Server 2008?

[Rabid Badger]

I'm looking at a small backup server for work and rather than mess with a seperate server and external array I'm thinking about getting a rack-mountable server with 8 hot-swappable bays.

Two bays will be occupied by the a pair of drives in RAID1 for the OS, leaving me 6 bays to stuff with terabyte drives. The actual capacity of 6 terabyte drives in RAID5 will be roughly 5.54TB.

Can Windows Server 2008 address a volume that large?

 

[Thuleman]

Short answer: Yes, BUT ...

Long answer: ... you will have to use GPT, see: Windows and GPT FAQ

Unless you have a very specific reason that absolutely requires you to utilize volumes later than 2TB, there are very some reasons to not create such volumes. To mind come software support (i.e. some apps will not be able to recognize that volume), organizational consideration (IT may benefit from creating volumes for individual users/units), and probably some other reasons I can't think of right now.

 

[swatbat]

The only other thing you need to check is whatever raid controller you get also needs to be able to support virtual disks over 2tb. Pretty much any modern controller shouldn't have this issue.

 

[Rabid Badger]

Sweet. Thanks guys!