Z800 SATA RAID Limitations

[VolkerSt]

Dear experts,

I bought a refurbished Z800 with the intention to use it as a test and development database server machine. I've attached four WD Red 3TB SATA drives and tried to set up two of them as RAID0 and the other two as RAID1 in the Intel SATA RAID configuration on BIOS level. However, they only show up with a size of 746.5GB in the BIOS RAID admin utility.

Has someone experienced this before?

Is it the expected behavior?

What's the maximum size of SATA disks to be used for RAID?

Is there a BIOS update available to resolve this issue?

All hints are appreciated.

TIA & best regards

Volker St.

[banhien]

Hi,

I think this is something to do with over 2TB HDD's. Please read the following article

      https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/2581408

and reformat HDD's properly.

Regards.

[VolkerSt]

Hi Banhien,

Thank you very much for your hint. I'm quite sure that this is not a Windows issue since it all hapened on BIOS level. So far, I haven't even booted the machine's Windows template nor formatted any of these disks.

But your response reinforces my 2TB (or 2.2TB decimal) idea, so unless I find a different hint first, I'll probably give two 2TB disks a try or try to manipulate the geometry mappings of the 3TB disks so they appaear smaller.

Thanks again & best regards

Volker

[Big_Dave · Accepted solution]

@VolkerSt

2TB is the typical restriction for RAID on consumer level PCs.  Large commerical data center storage device do not have that same restriction.

Changing the drives CCHHR information would not be my choice for getting the drives to work.  I suggest that you replace the drives.   BTW -- the drives should be able to RAID as 2TB devices with the last 1TB being lost so to speak.

I personally don't have a lot of confidence in "refurb'd" PCs as they were returned for some reason.  Stiil, you might get a good one.

[VolkerSt]

Thank you very much Big Dave.

That helps. I would have preferred to find this information in the manuals nonetheless, but probably the issue was out of reach at the time they were written.

I basically agree with your comments on refurbished hardware, but I am optimistic enough to hope they may have been (like I know from my employee experience) retired for calendar reasons, because leasing contract, warranty or support contract ran out. I wouldn't want to rely my business on it, but I consider it the cheapest way to get a big playground with awesome computing power for little money.

Thanks again

Volker