Thread: Raid 5 on windows 7

I just build my http and all works great. I setup the raid 5 through the bios and installed my OS, windows 7 RTM on my os HD. So I have the 640 GB WD os drive and 3 WD 1tb drives configured for raid 5.

When I go to computer, disk management and format disk. The raid 5 option is grayed out. The only option at this point is to create a new volume. I am confused at this point on what to do. I know windows 7 don’t support raid 5 but since I already have the hardware raid setup through the bios, what else do i need to do. It looks like my only option is to create the volume, format the drives and go from there. I would appreciate any help and advice you can provide me.

Thanks

If you have setup the RAID correctly in the BIOS, when you go to disk management you should see only 1 drive for the 3 drives that make up the RAID 5.

If you see 3 1TB drives then your RAID isn't configured properly in the BIOS. Windows should not be seeing individual drives. The RAID card should present the three drives as a single volume to Windows. You probably need to double check the RAID configuration in the BIOS. Another possibility is, if you did not allocated the entire 1TB to the RAID 5, then Windows is simply seeing the unused space which you could format as individual partitions.

It is correct to see only 1.8 TB on a Raid 5 Volume. You have 3 1tb drives. How ever hard drive manufacturers regard 1 TB as 1000 MB where it should be 1024 MB so in reality you get a little less "real" space.

Raid 5 uses at least 3 hard drives, 2 stripping the data and one for parity. It is used to have a safer storage medium where if one drive fails the array is still functional though with degraded performance giving you enough time replaces the failed drive or backup the data. The drive used for parity information does not count towards storage space.

Yea and keep in mind, that windows can’t have a partition bigger or equals to 2TB, so u gonna have to create partitions to divide it into smaller than 2 TB.

Maybe you already have smaller partitions just wanted to give you a tip on that one.