GPT and RAID 0

[redone632]

So I have 3x 750 GB drives in RAID 0. I split up the drives in the RAID tool in BIOS to have one LUN have 40 GB spanned over the 3 drives and the rest on the second LUN. I installed Windows Vista 32-bit (since I was unable to get 64-bit installed) I then have to format and allocate the larger drive in Windows. I then realized that you can only have 2 TB of space on a MBR drive.

My question is can you have a GPT and MBR drive on the same RAID array?

 

[redone632]

Nevermind, after deleting the partition I was able to convert the second disk to GPT.

However it says that I have only 2056 GB of free space... when it should be 2250 GB - 40 GB. Am I missing something else?

 

[scotty]

YYou're not factoring the decimal-to-binary conversion loss. This happens with every hard drive, always has.

Hard Drive companies define a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes (decimal). Operating systems define a gigabyte as 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 (binary). Basically, you'll always 'loose' 7% of a hard drive's stated capacity due to this conversion. 3x750 is indeed 2250, but a computer can only see that as ~2096GB. And you'll always loose a bit of space for file system features, etc, so as a result you end up with only around 2050GB free space. Perfectly normal.

LUNs... So you're installing Vista onto an iSCSI/SAN device?

 

[redone632]

YYou're not factoring the decimal-to-binary conversion loss. This happens with every hard drive, always has.

Hard Drive companies define a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes (decimal). Operating systems define a gigabyte as 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 (binary). Basically, you'll always 'loose' 7% of a hard drive's stated capacity due to this conversion. 3x750 is indeed 2250, but a computer can only see that as ~2096GB. And you'll always loose a bit of space for file system features, etc, so as a result you end up with only around 2050GB free space. Perfectly normal.

LUNs... So you're installing Vista onto an iSCSI/SAN device?

Ah, I completely forgot about that. It never really occured to me since it's ussually a small difference (like 1 GB) on smaller drives. But you really noticed the difference on 2 TB . Thanks.