RAID 5 Format Size

[dfotopro]

Hello
first time posting, hope some one can help.
I have a silcon valley 3124 4-port card attached to a windows xp pc. I am trying to format 4- 500 gb SATA drives as a 2tb array, however when I try to set the partion it only alows me to set 1.99gb..array then works and all drives show only as 1.99gb..any ideas

thanks
dfotppro

[Paul Komski]

It's not quite clear to me what/how you are doing things particularly since your array can only be the size of (n-1 multiplied by the smallest drive or) 1.5 TB for a RAID 5 array that this post was entitled about. One quarter of the available data is used-up for redundancy purposes in such a RAID array.

It sounds as if you might be making the array (by adding the four drives to it in the card's bios) but then having difficulty partitioning it. What are you using to do the partitioning? WinXP's Disk Management or a third party utility or Fdisk from some other source. 2GB is the limit for a FAT16 partition and is also a limit for File Size under many versions of FAT.

You would need at least WinXP SP1 to see any partition's over 128GB/137GiB though this doesn't seem to currently be an issue.

[dfotopro]

Paul

thank for getting back to me..I am using Win xp admin tool for format, it will not alow me to choose anyother fat or size..drive is western digital 500gb sata..computer also has internal sata drive..any idea where I need to look

thanks

dfotopro

[Paul Komski]

Still unsure about what you are seeing. Could you run diskmgmt.msc from the run box and post a screenshot. If you need help on how to do this just say so.

Also do any devices in Device Manager show any bold yellow punctuation marks beside them?