User Manual
BC4000 Series RAID Controllers
02/13/06
B ro ad c om C o r p or at i on
Document
BC4000-UM100-R
Working with Arrays
Page 75
3.
Follow the instructions provided by the
Write Signature and Upgrade Disk Wizard
to write a signature on the
drive. When you close the wizard, the
Computer Management
window reappears.
The O.S. Name is the same name found in the
Array Status
window. This is the array that needs to be
formatted before it can be used.
To format the array:
1.
Right-click in the white area surrounding the new partition, and then click
Create Volume
.
2.
Follow the instructions provided by the
Create Volume Wizard
to format the disk.
C
REATING
A
RRAYS
L
ARGER
T
HAN
2 TB
In the SCSI miniport architecture, there is a limit of approximately 2 TeraBytes (TB) per array, and arrays larger
than this do not operate properly on some operating systems. Windows addresses this problem in two different
ways:
•
Under Windows 2003 (with SP1) and 64-bit Windows XP:
Disks greater than 2 TB are converted to the
GUID Partition Table (GPT) format, which supports very large array sizes (up to 18 ExaBytes) and has no
artificial constraints on the number of partitions. See Chapter 16 of the Extensible Firmware Interface
(EFI) specification for details on GPT disks.
•
Under Windows 2000 and 32-bit Windows XP and 2003:
Disks greater than 2 TB are created from
groups of smaller arrays through the use of dynamic volumes. Dynamic volumes can be striped together
using the Windows Disk Management utility to create arrays larger than 2 TB from groups of smaller
arrays.
These two cases each use a different set of procedures to create arrays larger than 2 TB.
Note:
Expansion is easiest if the array is formatted with NTFS.
