WD30EZRSDTL (green 3tb) raid

I have a EVGA Classified motherboard and was a little dissapointed to learn that I could not get the onboard sata ports to identify the 3tb drives as anything more than 768mb.

I have 6 3tb drives.

I do not want to use 3 of the included rocketraid cards in my system. I would also prefer to not purchase an addon card only to find it doesn’t work (like I experienced with my motherboard.)

So that leads me to two questions:

  1. is there any way to get the drives to work with the onboard sata ports of the EVGA Classified motherboard (bonus points if there’s a way to make it work with the onboard ICH9R raid.)

  2. which addon raid card would work best with these drives (for instance, would the rocketraid 2720 be a good choice?)

I am running Windows 7 but would consider upgrading to windows 2008 r2 to use the software raid 5 available there.

Thank you for your time and consideration!

 swank.

bump :slight_smile:

Your drive is probably showing up as <1TB because you’re running a 32bit OS or have it partitioned oddly. I run a huge 8x1.5TB array and bypassed that limit with an ugly hack (multiple 2TB partitions linked into a single spanned volume), but it degraded performance and I didn’t like it. I eventually upgraded to Win7 64bit and switched to native support for large partitions (GPT). Now I boot from my RAID and it’s rock’n fast.

If I were you, abandon all hope for integrated RAID. The ICH9R chipset is **extremely** bad at RAID-5 (we’re talking 10-20 MB/sec), and RAID-0 with large-capacity drives is begging for trouble. Worse yet, the ICH9R’s RAID-0 can reach maximum performance with just 2 or 3 drives. Software RAID-5 on top of that would slow it down further. There’s not much you can do but buy specialized hardware.

Before building my array, I did some homework and found the Areca 1220 controller (among others) featuring 8 full-speed SATA channels, a PCIe 1x interface, on-board CPU, 256MB cache, and RAID-5 and 6 (extra redundant) support. It’s expensive, but it’s the kind of thing you’ll need for a large RAID. I get 450-480 MB/sec read and write performance from my array on all RAID-5 and 6 partitions.