DRIVE Station 4 Tb as a single drive with raid 5

paolopoletti · February 10, 2009, 05:20:11 AM

Good morning.

Is it possible to configure the Drivestation 4 Tb as a single drive with RAID 5 ?

We will use it with Linux so we have no 2 Tb limit...

Colin137 · February 11, 2009, 05:25:14 PM

Yes. You'll need to use the RAID setup utility on a windows machine to set the drive as RAID5. Since it uses hardware RAID, once the RAID is set up, you'll be able to use it on the Linux box.

paolopoletti · February 12, 2009, 01:50:32 AM

I've tried but the utility automatically create 2 drives... is there any way to force it to build one single drive ?

Jason · February 13, 2009, 09:08:22 AM

If you're using the Raid Utility and selecting RAID 5, you're saying it created two volumes?

If this is the case, provide your operating system please, you may be running into a Windows limitation here.

paolopoletti · February 13, 2009, 10:59:16 AM

Exactly !

We'are using Windows XP,and when i select raid 5 in the tools, it create always 2 drives.

Jason · February 13, 2009, 12:12:45 PM

You're exactly right, it(winxp) has a logical limit of 2TB of RAID for a localy attached device.So it automatically splits it up in the way you're describing. There really is no way around this, if you use RAID 5 on a 4TB device.

Message Edited by Jason on 02-13-2009 12:13 PM

paolopoletti · February 13, 2009, 04:29:41 PM

But, if the tool run only on Windows environment, does this mean that raid 5 with a single 3 Tb volume is not possible ?

I use Ubuntu Linux, but the setup utility does not exist for this operating system, so i have to setup my Quattro drive with Xp...

Jason · February 14, 2009, 11:35:50 AM

Well, where you set it up doesn't matter, you can set it up on xp and then move it over to something else, and as long as that OS you're moving it to doesn't have that limitation you're fine.

Colin137 · February 14, 2009, 11:50:39 AM

Once the device is in raid5, hook it to the windows machine and delete the partitions, then create a new one for the whole volume.

paolopoletti · February 15, 2009, 12:54:14 PM

The problem is that the 2 logical drives (D: and E:) are seen as two partitions on two phisical disk, also on Win XP.

When i connect i with Linux i see two phisical drives againd (/dev/sdd and /dev/sde) everyone with a single partition on it (/dev/sdd1 and /dev/sde1).

Colin137 · February 17, 2009, 03:42:03 PM

Ok, that's not right. Let me test this, I'll get back to you.

Could you reboot the machine with the drivestation attached, then PM me the output of "dmesg"?

Message Edited by Colin137 on 02-17-2009 03:44 PM

Vasja · February 26, 2009, 10:04:30 AM

Did you come to a solution on this matter? Maybe there is a new software released? Becouse no matter how hard i try to build only one partition (in winXP) on 4TB drivestation it always ends up creating two of them!!

I'm greatfull for all help.

Colin137 · February 26, 2009, 10:36:28 AM

Vesja, Windows XP 32-bit is limited to 2TB partitions. XP 64-bit, Server 2003 64-bit, Server 2003 RC1, Vista and Server 2008 do not have this restriction when using GUID partition table (GPT). To my knowledge, Microsoft has no plans to update 32-bit XP to use GPT, so this issue will remain.

paolopoletti, it looks like your issue is related to the MBR partition. MBR partitions are a maximum of 2TB in size. You'll need to delete the partitions, and change the partition map to use GUID Partition Table (GPT) instead of MBR.

kdombaz · February 27, 2009, 07:28:18 AM

Hi,

I tried everything which has been suggested in here and elsewhere in order to created one 2.7Tb partition for Linux (CentOS) with no success. I even configured it in MacOSX without the 2tb limit and still same limitations. GPT can be used but it sees one phyisical drive of 2199Gb. Limitation seems to be coming from the way the internal OS (some sort of unix derivative I suspect) configuring the drives and unless we hack into the internal OS we will not be able to do what we want to do. The other option is that Buffalo can release a linux version of the config. sw which allows you to create one full size RAID5 partition.

Thanks

Koray

Message Edited by kdombaz on 02-27-2009 07:31 AM

b_hammer · November 09, 2009, 07:31:58 AM

Has there been a solution to this issue? I am interested in purchasing the Drivestation Quattro Turbo USB 4TB model for my Linux MythTV system. I would like one Raid 5 partition with close to 3TB of storage space. I currently plan on using NTFS as the file system for compatibility with the rest of my network, and connecting it to my Linux box via eSata or possibly USB 2.0. I have other computers on my network running Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and of course Linux which could be used to run the Raid setup utility I keep reading about.

If I buy this device, can I set it up for one Raid 5 partition?

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DRIVE Station 4 Tb as a single drive with raid 5