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So I hooked up my RAID5 array

E

EnderW

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I just hooked up my RAID5 array:

4 x WD2500JD
LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4

Pretty straight forward, just poked around in the card's BIOS after skimming through the manual and all seemed well when I checked under Disk Management in Windows and saw 700GB of unallocated space.

Then I right clicked to format it and there was no "Partition" option, only "New Volume." So I went with that and I noticed it's a little different then what I was expecting.

The array is listed as "Simple" instead of "Partition". Is this normal? My only other experience with RAID was setting up RAID1 on my mom's computer with the onboard Intel controller, and Windows treated it exactly like a single disk.

And BTW, it has taken this thing like 10 minutes to get 3%, is that normal?

Screen shot:

http://www.supload.com/012005/raid5.PNG


edit: OK, I converted it back to a "Basic" disk and formatted it as one big partition. It finished in like 2 minutes.

I ran HD Tach on the RAID5 partition and on my Raptor comparison.

http://www.supload.com/012005/raid5 hd tach.PNG
http://www.supload.com/012005/raptor hd tach.PNG

Does that look about right? Is there anything else I can do to test the array before I sart copying data to it?
 
Well, you could copy a bunch of known-good ISO files over and then md5sum them to make sure they match. That would test the disks well enough for this purpose.

That looks like it'll make a nice storage array.
 
Doesn't really seem right. Could just be the LSI controller tho. If you want more speed, you could consider raid 10
 
RAID-5 is really more of a capacity tool than a performance tool. If you're looking for performance, one of the striping/mirroring hybrids, such as 10 or 0+1 is your best bet.

You can get good performance out of RAID-5, but only if you have pkenty of bus bandwidth for software XOR work, or shell out serious bucks for a full hardware accelerated RAID board.
 
EnderW said:
Then I right clicked to format it and there was no "Partition" option, only "New Volume." So I went with that and I noticed it's a little different then what I was expecting.

The array is listed as "Simple" instead of "Partition". Is this normal?
Click to expand...

Sure, for a dynamic disk :p

Partitioning go astray?
You really want a DD?

Think you might want to revert that and start over ;)
 
I'm really new at this. I'm not worried about performance since this is just going to be used for storing media files - music, movies, etc. I just ran HD Tach to see if it was running at "normal" speeds.

Ice Czar, did you see my edit in the first post?
OK, I converted it back to a "Basic" disk and formatted it as one big partition. It finished in like 2 minutes.
Click to expand...

I don't think a DD is what I want. I plan on doing some reading tonight and study up on all this.

Basically, I'm just going to be using this as a storage drive, so I just want whatever will be the easiest to to setup and have the least amount of issues.

I copied over a 40GB folder last night and all seems well. It seems to seems to be faster then my 300GB 7200.8 that's holding all my stuff right now.
 
nope was a quick lunchtime scan & post :p

you definately want the basic disk
Dynamic Disks are like a strange dialect
and there arent all that many reasons youd actually want to employ it


Dynamic Disks
Description of Disk Groups in Windows Disk Management
Dynamic vs. Basic Storage in Windows 2000
Basic and Dynamic Disks @ Windows & .net Magazine
HOW TO: Recover an Accidentally Deleted NTFS or FAT32 Dynamic Volume
Dynamic Disk Hardware Limitations (No firewire, USB, removable or laptop)
HOW TO: Set Up Fault-Tolerant Sets on Dynamic Disks in Windows 2000
Dynamic Disk Numbering and the DmDiag.exe Tool
HOW TO: Regenerate a Dynamic Mirrored Volume in Windows 2000
Restrictions on Extending or Spanning Simple Volumes on Dynamic Disks

Limits of Dynamic Disks in Windows 2000
LDMDump (Freeware utility) @ sysinternals
LDM Database @ Linux-NTFS project
LDM FAQ @ Linux-NTFS project
 
I've had two really bad experiences with dynamic disks. I don't like them at all. :(
 
so are there any tests I should run on this array before putting all my data on it?
some kind of Prime 95 for hard drives?
 
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