I think a tech may have done this wrong

[Jeff Pulera]

Four 2TB drives is 8TB, and of course in reality they actually format a bit smaller due to the numbers game, but if they were RAID 0 to begin with, you would’ve had over 7GB formatted.

With RAID 5, the capacity of ONE drive is used for the redundancy, so 8TB-2TB = 6TB, so the 5-point something seems right for the formatted RAID 5. You should not have unallocated space, they did not include all the drives when they assigned the RAID is my guess.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Alex Udell]

Jeff….

Could it be hot spare for rebuild?

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Jeff Pulera]

Even if they did purposely exclude one drive from the RAID as a “spare”, 3 drives provide 6TB, minus one 2TB drive for redundancy, would still leave closer to 4TB formatted, not the 2TB that the poster is reporting. Something is messed up.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Walter Soyka]

[Jon Doughtie] “For Premiere media, we have an array of four 2TB disks. They were hardware raided into a single virtual disc of about 5.26TB. Never looked at the RAID settings, just used the system. We had to send the system back because Windows refused some updates. When we got it back, we have about 2TB for media storage and 3TB “unallocated” according to Windows Disk Management.”

Your techs are wrong.

I agree with Jeff — the 5.26TB size was consistent with RAID5 on 8TB of raw storage. RAID 0 would have been ~7.5TB.

2TB is a magic number for storage: it represents the address limit of 32-bit MBR partitioning. Unless your volume is partitioned GUID (aka GPT), it cannot exceed 2TB.

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2581408

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Adrian Lyons]

I am making some assumptions here, correct me if I am wrong.

If the Unallocated section is on the same drive, all that is happening is they did not partition the volume to the maximum capacity.

You can expand the volume in the Windows Disk Management console or use a third party app to expand the existing partition.

Here’s a page that has simple instructions.

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

[Adrian Lyons]

Might I also add, I would suggest against setting a media drive RAID to level 5. You will have a drop in throughput which could effect your editing capabilities.

Instead, a simple RAID0 (striped array) will provide maximum performance. As for redundancy, setup automatic backups of the editing drives to a second HDD. Setup another automatic backup to a third HDD. The two backup HDD should have different sync times. I have the first backup in realtime so any edits are backed up immediately. The second backup drive I have run every other day. This gives me a day to go back in time in case the project files get corrupted on the live editing array or the first backup (since it is realtime).

Hope that helps production.

A.

[Jon Doughtie]

I agree with you on the backups, Adrian. Regrettably it isn’t my machine and I do not get to make those decisions.

[Ericbowen]

Walter is correct. Someone set the disk to MBR when they initialized it most likely. That limits any partition size to 2TB. You have to delete the current partition on the drive and then convert the disk type to GPT. Once that is done then you can create a new partition that uses the entire volume space. The size you mention is a raid 5 most likely. Due to the partition addressing information and block allocation you never get the entire space of the drives. So a 8TB raid 5 volume will show normally around 5.6TB or 5.8TB. Depending on the drives and controller.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com

[Andrew Kimery]

[Adrian Lyons] “Might I also add, I would suggest against setting a media drive RAID to level 5. You will have a drop in throughput which could effect your editing capabilities.

Instead, a simple RAID0 (striped array) will provide maximum performance. As for redundancy, setup automatic backups of the editing drives to a second HDD. Setup another automatic backup to a third HDD. The two backup “

Backup and redundancy are similar but different. Having backups of your RAID 0 provides, well, backups but not redundancy. If a drive in a RAID 0 goes down all data is lost and the whole RAID goes down until the bad drive is replaced and all the material from a backup drive is copied over. If a drive in a RAID 5 goes down there is no data lost and the RAID remains functional while the bad drive is replaced and the RAID rebuilt. The redundancy in RAID 5 limits the likelihood of down time due to hardware failure.

There is a performance hit for going with RAID 5 but if the performance is still good enough for your needs then there’s no reason to chose RAID 0 over RAID 5.

Ideally everyone would incorporate redundancy and multiple backups into their workflow.