Setting up Raid 5 on Terra-Master box

[Charmonium]

I'm a raid newbie and I finally decided that rather than have a dozen drive docks and endless duplication of data I would get a generous raid 5 set up and migrate everything over.

The box has 5 8tb drives for about 37.5 true gigabytes of storage with I think 20 something usable.

I rand the software to configure the box and that went fine but I don't see the box in windows explorer. OK, I figure I have to partition it and format it like a regular drive in disk management. This is on Win10 btw.

I go there and see it has some thing like a 20gig GPT protective partition, whatever that is and the rest is unallocated. OK. I right click to allocate but everything is grayed out. Hmmm.

So I go back into the Terra-master software thinking I missed something but no, there's no other option except for defining the type of RAID array.

So what did I do wrong and what do I do now?

thanks for any help.

 

[Ketchup]

I guess I am a little confused. What model do you have? From what I have read, these have their own OS, where the RAID array is configured and what-not. But then you talk about trying to format in Windows and looking at partitions from Windows Disk Management.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Says in the manual you should ignore the prompt to format the disk until after you create the RAID Group in Terra-Master's "Raid Manager" software. Then, yes, you go into Disk Management and format like a normal external HDD. So you're on the right track.

In Windows Disk Management, you usually have to "Online" a new drive before you can format it. Did you do that? (Right click on the disk name to the left of the partition map.)

On yours, it would presumably say "Online" instead of "Offline" there.

 

[Charmonium]

Thanks guys but the problem is that they didn't adequately test their software with windows 10. I went to do the return on Amazon and their tech support called me. I would have given TerraMaster a chance but they don't have phone support. What kind of bs is that? I'm giving them 1 star just for that.

Anyway, it seems that the box runs fine on win7 but there have been issues on 10. I'm not going to risk 20-30tb of data with a company can't adequate QC their software for a major operating system so this puppy is going back.

In terms of boxes with their own OS, you might be thinking of the Mobius raid box. You set the raid mode with switches on the back and then press a 'set' button. It then sets up the array. I ordered one of those tonight after I got the return auth. That seems to be a much safer way to do things, remove control from winblows completely. Just let it handle it as if it's an ordinary hard disk.