Couple of questions about RAID setup with Marvell Controller on my GA-P67A-UD7

[mclagett]

Hi --

I just set up a new machine with the GA-P67A-UD7-B3 and added three disks -- one 260 GB SATA 2 drive and two 2TB SATA 6GB/sec disks (all of them Seagate Barracudas).  I use the 260 GB as my boot and OS install drive and have Windows Server 2003 set up as the OS. 

I attached the two 2TB disks to the Marvell controller (SATA ports 6 and 7) and in the BIOS configured them as RAID 0.  All looks well and in the Windows Disk Manager, I'm just seeing a single 4TB drive (actually a bit less)

So I have two questioins:

1)  Everything looks like it went off without a hitch and it looks like I have one big drive (as I would have supsected).  In the Windows disk manager, this is shown as one disk with a single 3.8TB unallocated volume.  And of course no drive letters are attached to it, so I don't see any eveidence of it in Windows Explorer.  My question whether it is okay to treat this like one drive from a Windows perspective and to create partitions and format them with NTFS the same as I would do if it were really one drive.  I'm hoping the answer is yes, because I would love to really be able to treat this just as though it were one single drive and ofrom a Windows standpoint do everything just as though I had a single (very large) disk. But I'm totally new to to set each of these drives to operatee at 6this RAID stuff, and I'm not sure whether you can allocate partitions and format drives just the same as with a non-RAID configuration.

2) The second question is that the Marvell Utility is only listing each RAID drive as being configured for o3GB/sec.  THey are capable of running at 6GB/s and the i=utility did note that 6GB/s was included among the SUpported Features for these two drives.  So is there anything I can do to try to get these two disks operating at the 6GB/s that they are capable of?  Or is the speed somehow limited by virtue of they're being in a RAID configuration?

ANy guidance would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

My first thoughts on it would be that you would have to use GPT not NTFS because of the size of the drive you now have. In theory anything over 2.2TB has to be managed with GPT otherwise Windows won't be able to see it. Apart from that though I see no reason why it can't be treated as one large drive.

[Trevor.Dennis]

I hope you guys don't mind me hanging a question on the end of this thread, but it is fairly relevant to my problem.

I have an X79-UD5 based system.  I have placed my three stand alone drives on the Intel sata ports, including an SSD for the OS on port 0.

I have two 300Gb VelociRaptors configured as raid 0 on the Marvell 6/7 and they are working well.

I then connected two 1Tb WD Blacks to the Marvell 8/9 ports.  I set those ports as Raid in BIOS, but when I rebooted to the Marvell Configuration I could only see the first array with the two V'Raptors.  Nothing I do seems to give me an option to set up a second array.  The drives just arn't there.

If I start windows 7, I can see the two WD Blacks as unlocated in Disk Management, and I could probable set them up as a softwre raid in Disk management, but I would like to use the onboard controller if I could.

Does anyone have any ideas where I am going wrong?  I have asked the same question on the Adobe Premiere Pro hardware forum, and there is a wee bit more info in that thread, including Crytal disk mark for the first raid 0 with the two V'Raptors (but no answers yet)

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/944381?tstart=0

TIA

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

Just to make sure that I have a clear understanding of your setup am I right in thinking that you have seven drives (3+2+2) in total connected up ?