Large volume problem under Windows.

Hi,

I have to setup a IBM file server under Windows. It has 6 x 500 GB HD
connected to an Adaptec ServeRaid 8k.

This server will be used as a temporary storage for "Drive Snapshot"
backups (disk images) of other servers. It will contain a small 8 GB
partition for the OS and the rest for about a hundred large files
(several GB). Speed is important so I'd like to use RAID0.

My first attempt failed because I created a RAID0 2.7 TB volume and it
seems that Windows 2003 Server Enterprise SP2 32 bits cannot create more
than 2 TB of partitions (and I didn't want to waste more than 700 GB of
space).

Do I have to create 2 RAID volumes with 3 disks each (performance
probably will be lower) ?

What would be the best stripe size for very large files ? and allocation
unit size for NTFS ?

TIA.

--
http://ardennes.free.fr

Previously Paul Atreides <ardennes.DeleteThis@free.fr> wrote:
> Hi,

> I have to setup a IBM file server under Windows. It has 6 x 500 GB HD
> connected to an Adaptec ServeRaid 8k.

> This server will be used as a temporary storage for "Drive Snapshot"
> backups (disk images) of other servers. It will contain a small 8 GB
> partition for the OS and the rest for about a hundred large files
> (several GB). Speed is important so I'd like to use RAID0.

> My first attempt failed because I created a RAID0 2.7 TB volume and it
> seems that Windows 2003 Server Enterprise SP2 32 bits cannot create more
> than 2 TB of partitions (and I didn't want to waste more than 700 GB of
> space).

> Do I have to create 2 RAID volumes with 3 disks each (performance
> probably will be lower) ?

> What would be the best stripe size for very large files ? and allocation
> unit size for NTFS ?

> TIA.

For the size problem, you can just partition the whole array into
smaller partitions. To the computer it looks like one large drive.
No need to do several separate RAID arrays. (BTW: There are no RAID
"volumes". That term refers to partitions or filesystems. For RAID the
term is "array". An array can contain several partitions or "volumes".)

As to using a 6x RAID0, you are aware that its reliability is
approximately 1/6 (about 16%) of each single drive? And that
all data will be gone if one drive fails?

Arno