Assembling new build

[MSF]

I have assembled my new machine and when i do the windows install it tell me that my WD caviar black 640 gb hard drives only have 130 gb of free space in the partions. Where did the rest go and how do i fix it? I have a gigabyte ga-ma790fx-ud5p motherboard. i have the sata cables in sata2_0 and sata2_2.

Thanks
MSF

P.S. I'm using windows xp

[Perineum]

(EDIT: I've reread your question and I don't think I've answered your question. Also, I think you're missing information as you say "harddrives" (plural) but don't mention how they are setup, etc)

Nothing to fix. A GB is supposed to be 1024 megs of space. Harddrive manufacturers rate them as each GB being 1000 megs. And in the "cost" of formatting (Yes, formatting takes up room) and you'll be left with a noticeable amount of HD space missing.

My 3 500GB harddrives in RAID 5 should be 1TB, so 1024 GB. Actual space after formatting is 931.5 GB

[MSF]

The HDD are setup as bios default which is native ide. I want one as an OS drive and one as a storage drive. This is my first ever build so i don't exactly know what im doing.

Thanks
MSF

[Perineum]

How many partitions on each drive?

[MSF]

None it just states the unpartitioned space available as 130000 mb.

Back to work lunch break over.

Thanks
MSF

Originally Posted by Perineum

(EDIT: I've reread your question and I don't think I've answered your question. Also, I think you're missing information as you say "harddrives" (plural) but don't mention how they are setup, etc)

Nothing to fix. A GB is supposed to be 1024 megs of space. Harddrive manufacturers rate them as each GB being 1000 megs. And in the "cost" of formatting (Yes, formatting takes up room) and you'll be left with a noticeable amount of HD space missing.

My 3 500GB harddrives in RAID 5 should be 1TB, so 1024 GB. Actual space after formatting is 931.5 GB

That's not quite correct.. one drive is used for parity and the other is used for stripe. Parity drive is like a raid1 and stripe is a raid0

you've lost a total of 46.25gb per 500 on the stripe... the other 500 is like a back up for the raid5... only way to increase your size is to add more drives to the raid5. Some of this space is used for bad sectors a percentage of every drive is always unused. His only showing 130gb is totally wrong he should be showing around 600gb or so.

Originally Posted by MSF

I have assembled my new machine and when i do the windows install it tell me that my WD caviar black 640 gb hard drives only have 130 gb of free space in the partions. Where did the rest go and how do i fix it? I have a gigabyte ga-ma790fx-ud5p motherboard. i have the sata cables in sata2_0 and sata2_2.

Thanks
MSF

P.S. I'm using windows xp

It could be unformatted space and may show up in windows manager once you are fully installed. Did you partition this drive on purpose?

[MSF]

Im installing windows as i write this and will check and see if it shows up in the disk managers once xp is installed.

Thanks
MSF

[Perineum]

Originally Posted by HaDeS

That's not quite correct.. one drive is used for parity and the other is used for stripe. Parity drive is like a raid1 and stripe is a raid0

you've lost a total of 46.25gb per 500 on the stripe... the other 500 is like a back up for the raid5... only way to increase your size is to add more drives to the raid5. Some of this space is used for bad sectors a percentage of every drive is always unused. His only showing 130gb is totally wrong he should be showing around 600gb or so.

I completely at a loss as to what you're saying...

Why are you telling me how to add storage to my RAID? I know how to do that and I never asked how RAID 5 works or how to add storage.

Also, you don't know if my RAID 5 uses distributed parity or otherwise. If my RAID is using distributed parity then the parity information is on all drives and all 3 of my drives are striped.

Also, I realized *after* answering that he's missing almost 300gb of space on each of his harddrives, so I edited my response saying I needed more information.

Hence the reason I asked about him partitioning the drives.

[lsorense]

Originally Posted by Perineum

(EDIT: I've reread your question and I don't think I've answered your question. Also, I think you're missing information as you say "harddrives" (plural) but don't mention how they are setup, etc)

Nothing to fix. A GB is supposed to be 1024 megs of space. Harddrive manufacturers rate them as each GB being 1000 megs. And in the "cost" of formatting (Yes, formatting takes up room) and you'll be left with a noticeable amount of HD space missing.

My 3 500GB harddrives in RAID 5 should be 1TB, so 1024 GB. Actual space after formatting is 931.5 GB

Actually HD manufacturers treat 1GB as 1000000000 bytes, not 1000MB. Given 1GB measured the binary way is 1073741824 bytes, you are looking at about a 7.5% difference. The filesystem only takes a small amount extra (although it does take some).

A 500GB drive is hence 465GB when converted to normal GBs. Or to follow SI, 500GB = 465GiB.