Originally Posted by
BigLar
My RAID 1 controller is a Promise something-something 2000. I installed two (formatted) HD's and booted up. The controller's bios detected the drives and asked a couple of questions regarding what I wanted to do (raid 0? raid 1? raid 10?) and then set it up. Only took a minute or so.
It's running on a 1.8 GHz machine w/XP pro and just sits on the cat 5 cable in the basement. The array is mapped so that each computer has its own pot to dump stuff into. If I remote (or physically) access the computer I can see all the folders, but in general each user has his/her own space to store things.
At any rate, the drives had to be formatted, and the controller just arranged its' internal logic to do what I wanted. No additional formatting (of the drive) required.
There should be a config option allowing you to choose the behavior. This example can help understand the difference in general. When thick provisioning VMware disks, 2 options are given: lazy zeroed and eager zeroed.
Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed
Creates a virtual disk in a default thick format. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated when the virtual disk is created.
Data remaining on the physical device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand at a later time on first write from the virtual machine.
Thick Provision Eager Zeroed
A type of thick virtual disk that supports clustering features such as Fault Tolerance. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time.
In contrast to the flat format, the data remaining on the physical device is zeroed out when the virtual disk is created. It might take much longer to create disks in this format than to create other types of disks.