Raid V Problem

[striker29]

Hey guys,

I have a new Gateway server with 3 scsi drives which have all been converted to dynamic disks. I am trying to set up Raid V fault tolerance on this server, but have run into a problem. When I try to create the Raid V volume, I am not having that as an option. Only simple volume is available to me, and the other options (spanned, striped, mirrored, raid v) are ghosted and I am not able to select anything beside simple. This is my first time to set up raid v so I am not sure what the problem is. I checked the knowledge base at microsoft, but didnt really find any answers there. Does anyone have any ideas?? TIA...Mark

 

[Shift838]

First off all drives have to be the exact same drive,heads, sectors, media, etc. Also if you want a striped set with parity, you will need 4 drives.

 

[Seaspray0]

You can only create raid on a dynamic disk. Go to your disk management console. There you can check the properties to see if the disks are basic or dynamic. If they are basic, convert them to dynamic. Right click the drive identifier to the left of the partition info and convert the drives to dynamic. Remove any existing partitions you don't want to make space for your raid. Now right click the unused portion of any of the dynamic disk and see if you can now create your raid 5 (minimum 3 disks required to make a raid 5). You don't need equal sized disks or even disks of the same manufacture. What you do need are partitions of equal size on each disk (the size of the partitions will be limited to the maximum unpartitioned space available on the drive with the least amount of free space). I've seen a demo where you can create a raid 5 with some of the disk space of each drive, then mirrors with some of the space, as well as regular drives if you are using the software functions of raid 5 in windows 2000. A good hardware scsi controller will be able to do all this as well as get the operating system included in a raid (can't through software raid).

 

[striker29]

Thank you very much guys, I think I have got it figured out now. This raid V is some tricky stuff to me, but is required in this situation. Once again thanks for your help, I think thats what I needed to know.