Raid 10 configuring

[babek]

Hi. this is my server. rx 300 s7 server. prosessor intel cpu e5-2670 2.60 ghz with 64 gb of ram and 8 hdd with 900 gb. i have created raid 10. Now the amount of the disk space is 3.6 tb. Now i have a problem with the OS. When i istall windows server 2008 r2 on it, the windows system does not recognize space more thant 2 tb. Actually i can solve the problme another way but it is not correct i assume. Here it is:

i create raid 1 with only two f disks. and another 6 disks i make raid 10. it works, no problem. but i do not want to make raid 1 and raid 10 altogether. i must create only raid 10.

Can you tell me what mistake i make here?

Thank you

[Davie]

The problem is that you have a volume greater than 2Tb. Current BIOSes need to have the boot volume formatted to MBR format (which only supports up to 2Tb). To access more than 2Tb you need to format the volume to GPT format - but most BIOSes don't (yet) recognize GPT volumes - although the UEFI BIOS has partial support for it, I don't think it is fully implemented yet.

So your boot volume needs to be < 2Tb MBR format to be able to boot from it - then you can have another non-bootable volume for data > 2TB GPT formatted

If you were using RAID5 then you could create a 2Tb volume spanning all the disks and then another RAID5 over the same disks using the remaining space - but I'm not sure if that works with RAID10 (haven't tried it)

So you may have to go with 1xRAID1 and 1xRAID10 after all

[babek]

ok. i already did it this way. Just wanted to be sure. thank you for an advice.

[me@work]

Hello,
do you still remember your own question asked here, almost one year ago, and the replies given?

Just like Davie already suggested, it is NOT necessary to dedicate a separate RAID1 to the MBR boot VD. Instead, you just define one smaller and one (or more) bigger VD on the same RAID10.

Of course, your configuration with a separate RAID1 does work as well, but you already noticed that.

[Davie]

Thanks me@work .. I just wasn't 100% sure if you could have more than one volume spanning the same disk set in a RAID10. I know you can in RAID5 but never tried it on RAID10 - so thanks for the confirmation