Parity Initialization

[no1youno]

Hi all

I am currently setting up my Proliant ML370 server with a RAID1 & RAID5.
Logical Drive 2 is setup with RAID2 and apparently has a background Parity Inialization in progress. I understand that this may take several hours to complete?
However I would assume that I would still see the drive in Windows Explorer, but I don't, I only see see drive C:
Is this right? Do I need to wait until the Parity Inialization is completed before I see Drive D:

Cheers

 

[cajuntank]

Your not going to see the drive in Windows Explorer since you haven't told Windows OS what to do with it yet. Go to disk management and it should be there as a drive ready to partition and format. If it does not show up as a drive at all under disk management, then make sure all firmware and HP software is current.

If still and issue post back what generation ML370 it is and what array controller model?

 

[no1youno]

Thanks cajuntank. I ended up using Paragon Partition Manager and did it that way.

By the way, the Logical Drive 2 (RAID5) is setuo with 3x 18Gb drives, however the Logical Drive is only showing a total of around 34Gb. What has happened to the other 18Gb?
I thought RAID5 combined all the physical drives?

Cheers

 

[cajuntank]

RAID5 stripes data and a crc checksum parity bit across all drives. This physically uses all drives but from a usability perspective only logically shows n(number of drives)-1(space needed for the parity bit). So therefore,
3 x 18GB drives will give you a total of using formula n-1, or 3 drives -1, of 36GB (2x18GB). Partitioning out a 36GB raw drive will give you about 34GB of usable space because of formatting and OS overhead.

RAID 0 (striping only) would have given you 54GB of raw space but no redundancy and if one drive failed, the entire array would fail. NOT GOOD!

Hope that helped.

 

[no1youno]

Yes it helped, thank you. Although I don't know what a "parity bit" is, the main thing is that I haven't done something wrong.

Cheers