XP HDD RAID Limitation

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Neo_X

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Hi guys.
Hope anyone can help with this. I went all out crazy with 12x500Gb HDD's and plan to RAID-5 them on my System. This will be for Home "BACKUP" :D use, so i dont really want to use any other operating systems.
What i have found so far on google is that their is maybe a lmit of 2.2Tb on XP professional. Is there somebody here that can confirm this?
IE. sumbody that maybe is just as crazy as me to have more than 2TB on a XP system
I would really not like to go for Vista... YET.. :)

Thx alot guys in advance
 
lol. You are mad.
If there is a limit, go for for Server 2003. Mines in heavily optimised. The installation disk size is 300MB when I was finished with it.
 
You will probably find container size is limited to 2.2GB. All you need to do is splite them up evenly.

3 x RAID5 using 4 disks on each.
2 x RAID5 using 6 disks on each.
 
Lol.. sorry im only on abt two terrabytes bud.. so i cant tell you if it has an issue above that :)

BTW what case can fit 12 HDD's in :)
 
My Goal was the 5.5TB route.. ie to give up the least amount of space for the redundancy. Looks like i will have to go trial and error with the different operating systems in order to see which one has the best RAID and gaming support. Does anyone know if XP 64-bit is worth the trouble installing?

BTW
hav 4.5TB of "Backup" data already,of which at most 1kb(offcially...) is PORN. :)
The 4TB is spread out over a few RAID-0 partitions,installed in two CM-Stacker units which makes it a huge risk should one of the drives fail.
 
JUGGY said:
You lose one for every 3 drives as far as I understand it.
Click to expand...

Not sure that is 100% correct.

RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 disks, so with 3*500Gb disks you will only have the 2*500Gb space.

But I have a 4*400Gb RAID 5 setup and I have 3*500GB space.

So not sure what will happen in a 12 disk RAID 5 setup??
 
Juggy, WonderBob, it works like this. To make it really simple, let say we have five discs. We store a number on each of the four discs, and on the fith we store the sum of the first four:

1 2 3 4 5
=====================
15 25 35 45 120
8 12 3 7 30
9 1 4 2 17
5 3 3 9 20

Let's say we lose disc 3. The value of 3 can then be calculated by taking the parity and deducting what's on the other discs, thus, in the first row: 120 - 15 - 25 - 45 = 35

This is a very simplistic explanation, and only of the concept, not the implementation. Either ways, you can see that you can keep adding discs to your heart's content, you will always have as much space as the number of discs - 1.
 
JUGGY said:
Yeah, just checked and you only lose one. Just didn't make sens ethat 1 disk can hold parity for 100 other disks.
Click to expand...

That part puzzles me as well.

I am happy with my 4 disk RAID5's.

stats for 2 years:

Drives lost = 2
Data lost = 0
:)
 
koffiejunkie said:
Juggy, WonderBob, it works like this. To make it really simple, let say we have five discs. We store a number on each of the four discs, and on the fith we store the sum of the first four:

1 2 3 4 5
=====================
15 25 35 45 120
8 12 3 7 30
9 1 4 2 17
5 3 3 9 20

Let's say we lose disc 3. The value of 3 can then be calculated by taking the parity and deducting what's on the other discs, thus, in the first row: 120 - 15 - 25 - 45 = 35

This is a very simplistic explanation, and only of the concept, not the implementation. Either ways, you can see that you can keep adding discs to your heart's content, you will always have as much space as the number of discs - 1.
Click to expand...

Fair enough but where is the actual data stored? How is data not lost and what if the disk holding the parity info is the one that dies.
 
Well, if the parity disk dies, you wont lose data, cause the data is on the other disks.

You just replace the parity disks, go to your RAID manager and rebuild the array, and the parity is recreated.

if I remember correctly (finished my IT studies way back) :)

I can remember what RAID stands for though :)
 
RAID = Redundant Array of Independant Discs or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs - depending on the era...
 
Even if you have RAID 5 it's a good idea to back up your data to non RAID storage (well RAID 1 storage is fine). If your controller dies and you can't get a replacement you're screwed.
 
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