Maxiumum Hard Disk / Volume Size

[Deleted]

Hi guys,

Quick question. I currently have 2x 1TB hard drives in a RAID stripe (forming a 2TB volume in Windows) and I'm considering upgrading these to 2x 2TB (therefore forming a 4TB volume). I understand that the maximum supported size by my 32-bit PC BIOS is 2.19TB per bootable drive, however the question is whether the RAID volume that's managed by the ICH10R is logically above the BIOS level? In other words, will I be able to boot from a 4GB stripe?

Z

[ispano]

That's pretty much correct, you won't be able to boot to that without EFI. Also, even if you could, you would have to put Windows on a partition under 2TB, since you would need GPT to have a partition larger than that, and only x64 Windows 7 can boot to GPT and only on EFI.

EDIT: Actually, after doing some MORE searching and reading (good habit people!) You should be able to make a smaller partition to boot from, then partition the rest for DATA or what not. As long as the boot partition is MBR(ie no more than 2TB), it should work.

[Neriya]

EDIT: Actually, after doing some MORE searching and reading (good habit people!) You should be able to make a smaller partition to boot from, then partition the rest for DATA or what not. As long as the boot partition is MBR(ie no more than 2TB), it should work.

Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Entire disks are converted to GPT, not partitions. Thus, it's not possible to have a MBR partition to boot from (smaller) and a larger GPT data partition.

You can, however, easily boot from the existing 2 TB array and use the new 4 TB array as a data drive.

My personal setup is booting from a RAID1 mirror of 250GB drives, and then four 2 TB drives in RAID5 (giving 6 TB capacity). For me, the RAID1 is MBR (basic disk) and the RAID5 is GPT. This setup requires Vista/7, of course.

*edit* Fixed silly math mistake

[ispano]

Derp, that would be correct. Sad since I have a 12TB array and use GPT too.... >.> He would need to make at least two partitions for it to work (assuming just the 4TB array and nothing else of course), or if he has Matrix RAID, create a small "drive" and use MBR for it and boot windows to that and then use the rest for a larger "drive" and then use GPT if it was over 2TB.