htpc'd
12-29-06, 03:43 PM
All,
I have a Areca raid card that I've been living with for about 6-8 months now as working at only half capacity.
The card was about $1200 bucks at the time and 500gig HDDs were close to $400/pop when I bought this thing. I bought the card yes for performance (Great review by Tom's HWare etc), but I flet that is tould be the best suited to grow and expand with my needs. So card. 1 drive and other accessories I plopped down close to $2k in my disk subsystem alone.
I bought the card installed the drivers (NO THANKS to Tech Support) and got 1 drive working. I bought another drive 2 months later expanded the Volume and raid sets and upgraded to Raid Level 1 (with the second drive).
I bought another drive a month later expanded raid and volume sets and upgraded to Raid Level 5. Also with 3 500gig drives I expected to get 1tb of disk space.
Right now if I do a fdisk -l I get the message that sda does not have a valid file system table on it. This is not so much of a surprise to me, but what I had expected from the card and what it seems that other people experienced was that when they would expand raid and volume sets, the new drive would show up as sda(X) where X is the next available drive letter. Thus it would be pretty easy to make a partition for the new drive, make a file system, then modify the fstab table to make sure that the drive will be mounted properly so that all new disks would look as 1 big drive.
What I get now is:
1) Three 500 gig drives in 1 raid set and 1 volume set being seen to the files system as only 500 gigs.
2) one drive "sda"
3) no references to any other drive sda(X), sda(Y), sda(Z).
4) when I do a fdisk -l, a message stating that the "drive does not have a valid partition table".
5) when I do a "parted" check command I get a warning that the drive has 900 gigs on it but only 450 gig reported to the file system.
While I know this isn't Areca Support Forum, I would though like for people to weigh in on what my next moves are. I have bought still another disk and am about to copy all of the 500 gigs of data off to another backup drive.
From this point I can:
1) run fsck, but potentially corrupt my data (on the original disk).
2) run "parted" resize 0 450g (what I think the amount of useable formated disk space I have on this sda deice). See if this works and fixes the partition table, and if so then resize the partition size again to the full 900 gigs.
3) create a fully new partition on the sda device, put a new file system on it and hope that things work better when adding another drive.
4) Buy enough drives to fill up the whole 16 ports, then start from scratch with a new partition and file system (I could also get divorce due to all this addes expense).
5) If I were to put a partition and a file system on new drives before I attach them to the raid card and add them to the raid and volume sets, would this help? I never understood if the raid set and volume set expansion was supposed to do the disk maintenance for me?
6) Based on the proof that adding that 3rd drive made the sda device 900 gigs not totally available to the file system should I have concerns about my so called "redundant" disk not having a file system and partition on it also? How could I prove that if I did have a drive failure that the disks that are supposed to be redundant would actually be able to get build by the raid card?
7) don't worry about what fdisk and parted say and know that if the raid software says that I have 1 terabyte of data, then I do and let it figure it out, and let the raid and volume set expansion software take care of everything?
I have a Areca raid card that I've been living with for about 6-8 months now as working at only half capacity.
The card was about $1200 bucks at the time and 500gig HDDs were close to $400/pop when I bought this thing. I bought the card yes for performance (Great review by Tom's HWare etc), but I flet that is tould be the best suited to grow and expand with my needs. So card. 1 drive and other accessories I plopped down close to $2k in my disk subsystem alone.
I bought the card installed the drivers (NO THANKS to Tech Support) and got 1 drive working. I bought another drive 2 months later expanded the Volume and raid sets and upgraded to Raid Level 1 (with the second drive).
I bought another drive a month later expanded raid and volume sets and upgraded to Raid Level 5. Also with 3 500gig drives I expected to get 1tb of disk space.
Right now if I do a fdisk -l I get the message that sda does not have a valid file system table on it. This is not so much of a surprise to me, but what I had expected from the card and what it seems that other people experienced was that when they would expand raid and volume sets, the new drive would show up as sda(X) where X is the next available drive letter. Thus it would be pretty easy to make a partition for the new drive, make a file system, then modify the fstab table to make sure that the drive will be mounted properly so that all new disks would look as 1 big drive.
What I get now is:
1) Three 500 gig drives in 1 raid set and 1 volume set being seen to the files system as only 500 gigs.
2) one drive "sda"
3) no references to any other drive sda(X), sda(Y), sda(Z).
4) when I do a fdisk -l, a message stating that the "drive does not have a valid partition table".
5) when I do a "parted" check command I get a warning that the drive has 900 gigs on it but only 450 gig reported to the file system.
While I know this isn't Areca Support Forum, I would though like for people to weigh in on what my next moves are. I have bought still another disk and am about to copy all of the 500 gigs of data off to another backup drive.
From this point I can:
1) run fsck, but potentially corrupt my data (on the original disk).
2) run "parted" resize 0 450g (what I think the amount of useable formated disk space I have on this sda deice). See if this works and fixes the partition table, and if so then resize the partition size again to the full 900 gigs.
3) create a fully new partition on the sda device, put a new file system on it and hope that things work better when adding another drive.
4) Buy enough drives to fill up the whole 16 ports, then start from scratch with a new partition and file system (I could also get divorce due to all this addes expense).
5) If I were to put a partition and a file system on new drives before I attach them to the raid card and add them to the raid and volume sets, would this help? I never understood if the raid set and volume set expansion was supposed to do the disk maintenance for me?
6) Based on the proof that adding that 3rd drive made the sda device 900 gigs not totally available to the file system should I have concerns about my so called "redundant" disk not having a file system and partition on it also? How could I prove that if I did have a drive failure that the disks that are supposed to be redundant would actually be able to get build by the raid card?
7) don't worry about what fdisk and parted say and know that if the raid software says that I have 1 terabyte of data, then I do and let it figure it out, and let the raid and volume set expansion software take care of everything?