Thursday, November 29, 2007

M2N-E MediaShield RAID Problem

I was experiencing an interesting nerve break down while working on this project. It is about the same machine I mentioned in my earlier post. The motherboard is ASUS M2N-E with a nForce 570 Ultra chipset I consider it a very nice mobo.

So about the issue. I've tried to connect four hard disks of 1TB capacity each into RAID0 (stripping) mode, but every time I try to create an array more than 2TB(more than two hard disks) the nVidia's MediaShield Tool shows only 1.65TB. I've tried searching the Asus website about this (which is quite slow and can be a real pain in the @$$) and found out the following:

Question

My M/B cannot detect the total volume of my HDDs correctly when I use Raid over 2TB volume, why?

Answer

Due to the limitation of all the chipsets of Raid controllers, currently volume over 2TB will not be recognized correctly.


After reading such an answer more "why's" and "how's" started popping into my mind, and so I decided to write to the support staff to which he replied to me with a pdf file attached. The file contained some letter from seagate explaining that the limitation of 2TB is due to the drivers in the RAID controllers and never really contained the answer I was looking for.

So I've finally given up the idea of connecting the four 1TB into one big RAID monster, and decided to go for two arrays made up of two hard disks. But as soon as I created the arrays windows just won't see them. I had windows xp installed on an 80Gb Excelstor which was connected on one of the sata ports. So again I banged my head against the wall all night and couldn't get this right. Then suddenly I've tried to clone the 80Gb Excelstor to another 80Gb Excelstor on Parallel ATA. And here was the turning point. I accidentally booted from the 80Gb Excelstor on PATA and bam there were the two raid arrays I've previously created. I don't know why was this, but I surely changed my mind about PATA disks one more time.

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