Raid 5 help

I searched and found a few topics close but nothing right on. I set up RAID on my mobo and proceeded in installing Windows7. Now when I first set up my RAID5 using four 500GB HDD's it showed I had 1500GB. Understandable because 5 takes away one drive in case of drive failure. Now after the driver install I come to the menu where I need to format my drives. It shows my RAID5 array as only having 1370GB. Why is that? Did I do something wrong? The OS is installed on an 50GB SSD (that for some reason is only showing 46.5GB) seperate from the RAID5 array. I'm missing almost 700GB of memory here. What's going on?

That is absolutely phenominal. Thank you so much for your reply. I was dreading wrestling with installing everything all over again. I went through so much crap to get everything up and running right and had to learn so much I'm rediculously relieved to know it's semi over.

Lol looks like I'll be starting all over again anyway. System seemed to be running fine but as I dug deeper more stuff was wrong. certain windows programs couldn't be found. So in an effort to fix things I am wiping all drives and starting over. This time I'm going to attempt to install a bootable Ubuntu 10.10 on an e-SATA connected HDD while running 7 on the 50GB SSD. But I still need some help. I want to run WIN7 and only WIN7 on the SSD and the rest on the RAID drive. However I don't think I've quite grasped the proper way to set it up. I followed a tutorial on here but things still ran funky. Any suggestions?

On a workhorse system, you'd be better of just installing Windows 7 and then virtualizing Linux. Your system is more than capable. I can run two VMs at once without missing a beat in performance. RAID5 is kind of overkill for a non-server, but to each his own. The array size is completely normal though. I'm just surprised you missed the very simple problem, but got the much more difficult one correct. You knew that RAID5 loses one drive's capacity (hard concept), but missed the simple basic one, that a 500 GB drive is not a 500 GB drive once formatted.

Lol I knew you'd lose some of the memory but 200GB of unaccounted for memory was driving me nuts.

As far as virtualizing Linux I put a little thought into it. But I want the full experience of running it. I want to learn how to install and run the different apps on it. Not sure of how much you can actually do while running it in virtual mode. Lol my poor system has been running four about a week now and I keep shutting her down and reconfiguring everything.

And I'm actually thinking about running the HDD's 2x 500GB RAID0.

There's really no difference running Ubuntu in a VM, to be honest. The only difference is, you don't have to mess with bootloaders or run the risk of causing an issue with your Windows install. It will run extremely well, at pretty much native speeds. Dual booting is pretty a dead tech...left to fade away into the sunset. It isn't running in virtual mode, like XP Mode....it is a full fledged computer.

Speaking of dead tech, RAID0 with spinners is right at the top of that list. You get pretty much no performance gain, except for very unique situations, yet you double your risk of data loss, and can also increase your seek times which can impact basic Windows operations. It's been about 3-4 years since RAID0 really had a following and was considered a valid option on a desktop. Keep in ind I'm speaking strictly about HDDs, and not SSDs.

Hmmm. That sucks. I've never used RAID before now. I bought the 500GB drives just for it. Oh well. I'll still play around with the drives to see what I can get out of them.