Problems w/ Soft Raid 5 w/Rosewill RSV-S5

[tomwaddle]

Recently purchased Rosewill's RSV-S5. For those unfamiliar with it, you can check it out here.
I created the raid 5 using the entire disk. I then went to computer management to initialize the disk. When I right click on the disk, 'initalize disk' is not an option. Furthermore, the disk is showing two partitions and not one 3.96 TB partition. The second partition cannot even be formatted. Lastly, the partitions are showing up as an MBR partition style when I did not get to choose that option.
The instructions say you are supposed to create the raid first, then initialize the disk.
Has anyone else come across this?

 

[sub mesa]

What OS do you use?

You know about the 2TB limitations? Do you use GPT partitions?

As the site says:

# Warning: RSV-S5 Must work With Silicon Image Multilane compatible host (like RC-213/ RC-214/RC-219, which included in box). If you connect RSV-S5 to a host without Port multiplier function, the system might only catch one HDD instead of all.
# RSV-S5 can provide a huge storage space with 5 SATA 3G HDD.
# Please remind that the limitation for each partition for Windows system is 2 TB.
# If you set a partition which is more than 2 TB, system can only detect 2 TB max.

For others: this is a DAS solution, not a NAS.

 

[tomwaddle]

I don't believe the 2TB limitation is related to the hardware. I believe it refers to a windows limitation of seeing hard drives that are larger than 2tb with the mbr partition. I've read on newegg from several reviews with people using 1 tb drives and not having a problem.
I'm using Vista 64 bit.

 

[sub mesa]

So do you use GPT partitions? You know its not possible to have larger than 2TiB partitions without using GPT.

 

[tomwaddle]

That's the problem. I can't even initialize the disk and choose a GPT partition. After I created the raid 5, I went into disk management and saw two partitions that were already set to mbr partitions.

 

[sub mesa]

Can i see a screenshot of both Disk Management and Device Manager with your device listed?

 

[tomwaddle]

First one. The device is the, "Silmage Volume A Device."

Second one. As you can see, 'initialize disk' is not available.

 

[sub mesa]

I see two volumes: disk0 with 3726GB and disk2 with 3725GB; which is which? Do you have two of these boxes? What kind of disk is disk1, which is showing as Not Initialized?

You appear to have an M: volume; is that a totally different drive?

Unrelated to this; you do know such a "FakeRAID" solution is kind of unreliable and can never replace a backup? Don't have the impression you're safe with RAID5; especially with a Silicon Image solution. Also the write performance will be extremely poor.

 

[tomwaddle]

Forgot to mention that I have a silverstone fakeraid box on a separate silicon image controller. That is the M drive. That card is the one that shows up as 'not initialized' for whatever reason but the raid is working.
I am still waiting to hear back from Rosewill to see if they have seen this before. I might break the Raid and start over if they haven't.

 

[sub mesa]

Its a bit strange one works and the other does not. I hope Rosewill can help you with this. If they can, i'd love to hear from you. It may also help others who find this with google.

Good luck

 

[tomwaddle]

So I finally got a response from Sans Digital (they actually built the case; Rosewill re-branded it). They said disk management is corrupt cuz there should be no problem with my setup. They recommended using Diskpart but I had no luck with that either. So, I built a second system with Win 7. As soon as I loaded it up, the O/S was able to convert the partitions to GPT and now I have a 4TB raid.