Raid 5 Array 4 x 1.5TB WD Caviar Green drives

[locrieth]

Hi,

I've recently bought 4 x 1.5TB WD Caviar Green drives (WD15EARS) and i wanted to raid 5 them to create a 4.5TB array for my Windows 7 X64 media centre. I have a Promise Fasttrak 4310 raid controller (pci card) that i have been using in my media centre pc. It is based around a Asus AT3N7A-I Ion Intel Atom N330 DDR2 ITX Motherboard [90-MIBAN0-G0EAY0KZ], so i only have the option of a pci contoller card. I had been using 4 x 320GB hdd to make a 960GB raid 5 array, which worked fine but i had run out of space along time a go and was spilling onto external drives all over the place.

I connected up the 4 drives and went into the cards bios set up a raid 5 array and added all the disk. When i went to continue the array said it was 100GB and in windows registered as 96GB. After some searching around i found that not all raid cards will support arrays over 2TB, which causes a problem because the only option then is JBOD on the card and 1.5TB of movies, tv episodes and films is a lot to loose.

So i looked at software raid 5 in windows 7, but the option is greyed out in disk management, and is apparently only available in server editions of windows. I looked at a program called disparity, but to be honest, i would much rather try and get hardware raid.

I looked at the highpoint rocketraid 1740, which is 4-port and says it support windows 7 and arrays over 2TB (64bit LBA) , has anyone got one of these cards or used them? They are around £100 mark are there any other cheaper alternatives that will support over 2TB arrays?

So what i want to know is what are the options to try and get my array working in raid 5 to get the most out of my disks?

Thanks very much

Locrieth

 

[rpstewart]

Personally I'd stick with the card you have and run the disks in JBOD. Then spend what you would have spent on another card on more disks to have a proper backup.

RAID5 is all well and good when it comes to giving you some redundancy but that's all it can give you. A dead controller or data corruption will still leave you high and dry with no means of recovery.

 

[locrieth]

At present tho all my stuff is still on the older disks I had in the system anyway (backup) and as it just films, tv episodes and music the contents doesnt change a huge amount. I just wanted a way of fairly rapidly replacing any drives that fail with little down time and having them all stored in 1 location rather than keep moving stuff around when a drive gets full, to keep, say for example all of the tv episodes together rather than them spreading over multiple disks, as I have at the moment. The only 4-port pci raid card that supports over 2TB and works with Windows 7 that I have found so far is the Highpoint Rocketraid 1740, so I was wonder if anyone knew of any other cards that would fit these criteria and also if there is an upper limit for a 64bit LBA card as 48bit LBA seems to be 2TB if what I've read is correct.

Thanks for you help

Locrieth