Large Disk Layout, Best Practices

February 4, 2008

Good morning All!

I've got a brand new server with a RAID 5 controller in it and 6x750GB

drives. The box is going to run Win2K3 and be solely a data server and also

host Services for Unix.

What is the best way to lay out the hard drives and should I do it in

hardware or software? Right now the hardware has all six drives in a single

RAID 5 array totally up to about 3.75TB of space. I nstalled a copy of

Win2K3 Enterprise but it only sees the first 1.75TB of space and the

remaining 2TB is unusable and also, I can not covert it to a dynamic disk.

Am I taking the totally the wrong approach to this or did I just do

something wrong? Or, do I need to go to Win2K3 Datacenter Edition???

Should I layout the drives differently in the hardware and then just let

Windows have multiple smaller drives or what?!?!? I'm much more used to

Linux where I can just run LVM and pretty much do what I want.

Any advice?

-brian

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