Here’s the tech scenario: I now have seven active Seagate Barracuda SATA2 500GB drives in a RAID5 array, using a Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 card. This setup gives a total capacity of 3TB and can survive one drive completely dying.
Under Windows, drives are formatted with a Master Boot Record partition map. This format imposes a 2TB limitation on allocatable space within a volume. I was unaware of this limit when I set up the RAID card, and am now paying the price.
The problem is that now, I have 750GB of unallocatable space on my RAID volume. I can’t extend the existing partition or even create a new one, with a wonderfully incomprehensible error message leading the way.
Supposedly, this problem can be fixed by using a GUID Partition Table (GPT) setup. Unfortunately, GPT conversion requires an empty volume – and I have 2TB of data that can’t really be moved anywhere else.
Anyone know of a utility (open source, freeware, paid) to convert MBR to GPT? I’ve actually read the GPT specification and it doesn’t seem too difficult to implement, but I really don’t want to get into hex editing the raw disk for various reasons.
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I have used HighPoint RocketRAID cards with large capacity drives (12 x 1 TB = 12 TB in RAID 0), and had no problems with Windows XP as long as you increase the sector size in the HighPoint RAID config utility. 512 byte sectors will get you 2 TB max. 1k will give you 4 TB, etc. This is due to a limitation in Windows for the number of bits they use to represent the size of a partition. By increasing the sector size, you effectively get a larger partition with the same number of bits. I was doing this with an extra drive that is separate from the OS drive.
We’re using the newest 16-port HW RAID card (they just released it).
Good luck,
Neil
Thanks Neil! If you’re still following this, can you point me to exactly where in the HighPoint utility one would go to change the sector size? The documentation is a bit sparse on this point.
Ah, wait, you probably mean the BIOS-based utility and not the Windows admin UI? After reading some documentation, it looks like I might have to update the card to take advantage of it.
Not a problem; I’ll just have to do it tomorrow afternoon when I can reboot the box and find the hptflash utility.
hi,
I’m looking into making a server with 4×1.5TB in raid5 on the raidcontroller you are using.
A friend of my also has a raid5 with 4×1.5TB with his onboard raidcontroller. But his writespeeds suck pretty hard. His read is very nice, about 500MB/s, but his write is like 50MB/s.
Now I was wondering what your writespeed is of the raidvolumes since you have the non-onboard raidcontroller in use?
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