As I've discussed on here before, I'm running a RAID 5 array on my HTPC. Just last week I added a 4th 1 TB drive to bring the total usable space to just under 3 TB. But I'm quickly venturing into unknown territory and I wanted to see if there was anything I should be on the lookout for from those of you who have had arrays that big before.
Right now I have it as one single 3 TB volume mounted under windows (32-bit Vista to be exact). followed the directions in the Areca manual (as well as located here<ftp://ftp.areca.com.tw/RaidCards/Documents/Manual_Spec/Software/Over2TB_080612.zip>) for enabling greater than 2TB access when I originally built the array. I used the LBA64 method. But I noticed when I went to install Acronis Disk Manager it gave me the following warning: "Acronis Disk Director Suite has detected unsupported hard disk drives. Acronis Disk Director Suite does not support Windows Dynamic Disks, EZ-Drives, etc.Acronis Disk Director Suite will not be able to access these hard disk drives" When I brought it up it saw all the drives and partitions on the system except for the 3 TB RAID array. I was able to see the array under the Disk Management snap-in under Administrator Tools and used that to expand it from 2 TB to 2.8 TB when I added the new drive. It lists it as a "basic, simple, NTFS, primary partition". My concern is that I've done something which means I will only be able to access this array when it's attached to a Windows machine. Could that be true? Are there other "gotchas" I should be on the lookout for? Also, I've been reading some articles and papers lately about concerns on RAID 5 arrays, specifically that when a single drive fails they take so long to rebuild that there's a good chance another drive will fail before the rebuild is complete, meaning you lose everything. I'm considering switching it to RAID 6 which is tolerate to 2 failures. Any thoughts on that? Right now I have no other backup for the data outside of the array. --------------------------- Brian Weeden Technical Consultant Secure World Foundation <http://www.secureworldfoundtion.org> +1 (514) 466-2756 Canada +1 (202) 683-8534 US
