Hardware RAID-5 and Dynamic Disks (Extending Volumes)

dynamik

Hey Everyone,

I put four 1TB drives in a RAID-5 array. The problem is, the RAID controller only supports 2TB per volume, so I get a 2TB volume and the leftover on a separate volume. This actually scared me quite a bit at first, but I thought the problem was the RAID controller only supported three disks, which would have left me with an unusable 1TB drive. Fortunately, that was not the case.

I don't want to have two separate drives in Windows, so I converted the disks to dynamic disks and extended the first volume into the second. This worked, and I now have all available space accessible in one drive.

I never use extended volumes because they are like RAID minus the redundancy (would it be in poor taste to refer to extended volumes as AIDs?). This seems like a rather convoluted solution, but it works. I'm not seeing how I'm ultimately in a different situation than I would be if I had just been able to setup a volume >2TB in my RAID controller. Has anyone else done or seen this type of setup before? I'm just curious as to how it worked, and if there's anything else I should be aware of.

Thanks in advance.

Mishra

I'm pretty sure I did this same thing on some snap servers I used to manage. I didn't just extend the volume, I spanned across each volume that was created. I wanted to do a RAID-0 that way I was writing to all volumes at once but I don't think windows would have let me (and maybe because of iSCSI).

Oh I remember, I did this all through iSCSI which only allowed me to do 2TB volumes so I ended up spanning them.