Maevell RAID0 is too big!

[neilhodgkinson]

I have just finished, after many trials and difficulty's, building my first PC. The last two HDD's i attached were 3TB. I  put them both onto 2 x 6Gb/s Marvell controller SATA ports on my Asus P9X79 WS board. I went into the Marvell utility and set the two drives in RAID 0. I then looked on my desk top in Windows 8.1 but couldn't find the RAID so I did a bit of research and found that I needed to allocate them letters. I went into Disk management found the drive, seen as a single drive, and tried to right click and allocate a letter but there was no option. The only option to do anything was to make a simple volume. I looked on line again and this seemed to be the way so I formatted and created to simple volume, allocated a letter and felt very pleased with my self until I noticed that it was reading 6GB volume for a RAID0 of 2 x 3TB HDDs. I then went back into the Marvell utility to do a sanity check and see if I'd made something other than what I thought but in the Utility it read RAID0 64K stripe and strangle 6TB for size here also. I'm totally new to PC's and am sure I'm just looking at it wrong or something. I thought I would have 3TB's of space, is it possible a 6TB RAID0 form 2 x 3TB HDDs? What's going on? Am I even posting this in the right place? Can anyone help?

[ross06187]

@neilhodgkinson it sounds like you want raid 1.  where the 2 drives mirror each other if you want 3TB at the end.

 

you have 6tb as you have striped the dives into one large volume.

 

This might help

 

[neilhodgkinson]

No it's speed I was looking for with these two HDDs but I thought that in both RAID 0 and 1 you only got half the capacity or is that only for RAID 1?

[tobben]

No it's speed I was looking for with these two HDDs but I thought that in both RAID 0 and 1 you only got half the capacity or is that only for RAID 1?

watch the video he linked you, raid 0 wont half the capacity, you are just writing small pieces of the data some on the first drive and some on the other drive, writing/reading from both drives at the same time will increase the speed, but you are still left with the same ammount of storage, you create a single pool of the two drives, but this is risky as you double the chance of failure and the data is messed up if anything were to happen to either drive.

 

in raid 1 you write the same data to both the drives, you are essentially creating a duplicate of the first drive, making a realtime backup, thus if you have two 3 TB drives but write all the data on both drives essentially you are only left with 3 TB storage.

[xXxYOLOxSWAGxXx_420BlazeIt]

Windows should be able to create the NTFS on that RAID. Make sure you have installed the drivers. I also use a 6TB RAID0 in my main PC. I have a SSD as cache using the Intel Z77 feature.

 

If youre trying to boot from it, then it needs to be a GPT and not MBR format.