capacity limiation of using external RAID5? If so, any solution?

[King Cheung]

Dear All,

I just bough a new CFI Sil3726 Port-Multiplier Box (that is, an external
hard disk tower), which comes with a Sil3132R5 PCI-Express lX HBA card (that
is, a controller), and I put five WD 640Gbit hard disks into it. I wanted
to combine all five disks, total 3200Gbit to run Raid 5. However, when I
went to Disk Management under Computer Management, my computer didn't
recognize any new hard disk connected, so I couldn't initialize and format.

Then if I only combined three hard disks together, (that is, 1920Gbit only),
the Disk Management could recognize it and asked me to initialize.

In fact, this unit is my second one. My first one is identical with the
same box and card, except that the disk capacity is only 500Gbit, so with 5
disks together, the total is 2500Gbit, and it has been running perfectly
with my computer for many months already.

So, I wonder if Windows XP or any components of this configuration has any
limitation for the capacity of using external Raid. Maybe, I am thinking
something I didn't set correctly in BIOS?

My computer is:
motherboard: P5K-E series, Interl P35Chipset Support
CPU: Core2Duo CPU [email protected]
RAM: 2.34Ghz, 3.00 GB
OS: Windows XP Professional Version 2002 SP3
Controller: Cilicon Image ATA Controller, SST 39VF010 Chip, BIOS info 7.3.13

Can anyone help? BTW, I switch between two boxes with the two different
hard-disk sets, and I still have the same problem, so it is unlikely the
boxes or disks' fault.

Thanks in advance.

King

 

[tfw48079]

Support 5TB capacity ( 1TB X5 =5 TB but combine mode capacity above 2TB
require 64 bit system or variable block size file system )

 

[Andrew E.]

You might get some more info from kb309043 It details RAID-5