RAID 5 on 4 1TB Drives with Vista64

[Kayden]

My media server is running Vista Ultimate x64. I'm going to be putting in 4 1TB drives in a raid 5 which should leave me with 3TB. I plan on making it GPT/NTFS.

My main workstation is also VU64 so I'm not worried there, but my laptop is XP32. Will the laptop still be able to view all 3TB of the media server?

 

[halcyon]

Doesn't that simply depend on if you create a share and give the laptop/users access to the share you created?

Sorry, I was being a S/A. Yes, the laptop will see your shares fine as long as you take care of all the sharing business (perms, etc.)

 

[Kayden]

I didn't know if it was like using NTFS partitions with 98, IE you can't. I wasn't sure if anything that wanted to access it had to be capable of addressing all 3TB or if it was only up to the host system to address all the space and you could subsequently connect with any OS that could read NTFS whether it could make 2+TB partitions itself or not.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

The protocol used on Windows machines to access network drives is SMB/CIFS. As long as both machines (server and client) are capable of using this protocol, the underlying storage medium, including the file system and partitioning, is irrelevant.

That's what enables a Linux machine to share files to Windows machines -- the Samba package is responsible for the server side of the SMB/CIFS protocol, and can share out shares and files, even though the underlying file system might be EXT3.

In short, yes, even a Windows 98 machine could read/write files to your server, even though the Win98 machine could never handle a volume >137GB or an NTFS file system.

 

[Kayden]

Ooooooo. You're smart.