2TB limit on old Adaptec RAID card

[kakistos153]

So I have a an old Adaptek 2610sa RAID card, and I have 4x 750gb hdd's. I threw them together in a raid and booted up. When I went into the raid configuration it informed me that it has a hard limit of 2TB storage so the only raid option is raid10 (for my purposes effectively wasting a drive).

Is there a way to make this work without raid10? My first thought would be to change how much of the drives the raid uses. ie instead of using the full 698.6GB, have it use 650GB or so to get under the raid card limitation. is that possible? I would imagine it would be because thats basically what it does when you have different sized drives installed.

System information, Dell Poweredge 830, 4GB ram, Intel Pentium® 4 processor 2.8 GHz. Not sure what other information might be needed so just ask if there's anything i can add.

 

[GhislainG]

You should be able to create a 2 TB RAID 5 and then a second one that uses the remaining storage. http://www.adaptec.com/nr/rdonlyres/0877f6ff-458a-4cde-ba50-179bb693a1fe/0/3759_2tb_wp.pdf

 

[hang-the-9]

Are you trying to use them as a RAID 0 volume or what? You are not actually wasting a drive with raid 10 you are gaining disaster recovery options.
Not sure how it will behave if you try to just format the drives with lower capacity but then you are losing storage that way also. No matter what you do, you can't make 4x750 = 2,000 without losing storage. Even if you take away one drive when setting up RAID you will get pretty much the exact same storage then you would if you formatted the drives to 500 gig each to try to keep at 2 TB limitation.

If you want to maximize storage either update the card (used RAID cards are cheap) or get two 1 TB drives. Another option is to run two 750 GB drives in sets of two instead of one RAID volume for all 4.

 

[kakistos153]

What I ended up doing is creating one logical raid10 at 40gb for the OS and then creating a second logical drive at 2.2TB Raid5. I didn't know that was an option.

Now I'm having some performance problems but thats a question for another topic.
Thanks all.