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RAID 5

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by tech010

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OK, I installed Windows 2000 Server on Disk0 of my server. Now I want to impliment RAID 5, but I can't. It sees Disk1 and Disk2 but not Disk0 since windows is already installed on it. How do you set up RAID 5 on a Windows 2000 server? I can use the free space from Disk0 but then I get a RAID 5 volume that's not striping anything?? Please help.

10 replies

by timthetoolman

Hi,

Unfortunately you cant set up raid5 on the system partition. Well, not software based raid5, anyway.

If you think about what happens when you boot, and how raid5 works, you'll realise why...

Its simply a chicken and egg thing with the software to read the disks vs reading the disks to get the software up and going...

Partition your disks and start again.

Cheers,
Tim.

by timthetoolman

Oh, I should add that raid1 is supported. You can have disk mirroring for the system partition and on the rest of the disk, implement raid5.

That way, you'll have the redundancy given by multiple disks...

For example if your disks are 40Gb each...

Disk0 could be partitioned 10Gb + 30Gb
Disk1 could be partitioned 10Gb + 30Gb
Disk2 could be partitioned 10Gb + 30Gb

The system would be installed onto partition 1 of disk0 and then mirrored with partition 1 of disk1.

Raid5 would be implemented across partition 2 of each of the disks

...and you'd be left with partition 1 of disk2 to do whatever you liked with. Perhaps as a backup area? Or storage for non-essential data like patches or temporary files? Its up to you.

A far better solution is to use hardware based raid and then you can do what you like with the disks.

Cheers,
Tim.

by timthetoolman

Hi,

You can use it - just not for the system partition.

Were you ok with the suggestion re: how you *could* use raid 5 above?

If it were me, I'd be investigating a raid controller, though. Its much more efficient (no wasted CPU cycles to drive it) and they're not that expensive these days...

Cheers,
Tim.

by tech010

I understand what you're saying. So what is the point of having RAID built into Windows 2000 Server if you can't use it?

by nickw_uk

Probably won't help you now but hardware RAID must be the way to go. Windows won't even know it's happening.

by wizj

You need 3 physical disks aside from the system disk (total of 4). Make sure the 3 disks are converted into dynamic disk and from there, you can implement RAID 5 software by right clicking every dynamic disk.

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