Need help with installing hard drive

First, I'm running Windows 7x64 Ultimate. I recently bought 2 Samsung 850 EVOs to setup in RAID0, and I bought a WB Black 4TB drive to increase my storage. After hooking everything up, I setup the RAID array, but then discovered my system used both SSDs and a portion of my WD Black drive to setup the RAID array. So, I removed the RAID and then rebuilt it using only the two SSDs.

I then proceeded to partition the WD Black drive using GPT, and when I go into Disk Management, it shows all my drives being partitioned and allocated, but I only have 3725.84GB free on the 4TB WD Black drive. When I view the properties of the disk, it shows 250GB being used but I can't find this anywhere. I've removed the partition, recreated the partition, I've removed the RAID arrays where Windows shows two separate drives, but I still can't find out what happened to the rest of my drive. Does anyone have any suggestions?

A 4TB drive should have 3725GB free space. That is correct. Why does it show used space I don't know. Try removing the partition and re-initialize the drive as GPT.

Hard Drive Size Capacities Calculator

GokAy said:

A 4TB drive should have 3725GB free space. That is correct. Why does it show used space I don't know. Try removing the partition and re-initialize the drive as GPT.

Hard Drive Size Capacities Calculator

I downloaded a software program called MiniTool Partition Wizard, which was free. When I open the software, under my new WD Black 4TB drive, it shows a 128MB partition, which is entirely full. It's a GPT (Reserved Partition), and listed under File System, it says Other. The remaining portion of my drive shows a 3725.90GB GPT. The file system here is Unallocated. I've tried removing the partitions from each, I've wiped the drive by writing 0s to it, and I tried creating one larger partition, but for some reason I can't seem to get rid of this 128MB partition. Is there something I'm missing? Is this partition supposed to be there?

The 128MB partition is normal, i asked about this here:
Why does Partition Wizard show a GPT (Reserved Partition) ?

Are you sure where you see 250 GB used really isn't 250 MB ?

DavidE said:

The 128MB partition is normal, i asked about this here:
Why does Partition Wizard show a GPT (Reserved Partition) ?

Are you sure where you see 250 GB used really isn't 250 MB ?

Well, what I figured out is that when I installed all 3 new drives (2 500GB SSDs in RAID0 and the 4TB WD Black Drive), I must not have noticed when setting up the RAID0 array with the 500GB drives, but the BIOS took 250GB of my WD Black Drive and added another drive to the RAID0 array I was replacing, which used 2 250GB drives. I feel dumb for not seeing that. I guess I was too excited about getting my drives installed and then transferring all my info from the old drives to the new drives.

One more question regarding the 4TB Black drive, does it matter how I format this drive to get the best performance out of it or do I just format it using the default sector settings?

I've already replaced my 2 250GB SSDs with the 2 500GB SSDs. Now I have more room to install my apps. I'm not quite sure what to do with the 250GB SSDs I replaced. I've heard some people caching their storage drives with an SSD, but from what I've read, anything over 60GB has no impact on performance. Besides, my 4TB drive is used for storing all my data files so I doubt it would be beneficial. I have all my applications installed on the 2 SSDs and my operating system installed on an M.2 PCIe SSD.

Well, let me fill you in. Here are the specs of the drive listed on Samsung's website compared to my RAID0 setup:

SAMSUNG SSD 850 EVO 500GB VS MY 2 SAMSUNG SSD 850 EVO 500GB RAID0
SEQUENTIAL READ SPEED
Up to 540 MB/sec Sequential Read 815MB/sec
SEQUENTIAL WRITE SPEED
Up to 520 MB/sec Sequential Write 1448MB/sec
RANDOM READ SPEED
Random Read (4KB, QD1):
Up to 10,000 IOPS Random Read 62647 IOPS
RANDOM WRITE SPEED
Random Write (4KB, QD1):
Up to 40,000 IOPS Random Write 104368 IOPS

Now, instead of reading about something, I just ran the tests using Samsung Magician and am pulling the individual drive performance info from Samsung's website. My Samsung M.2 PCIe SSD runs faster than my two SSDs setup in RAID0. They're running off an Intel controller and I have the SSDs setup using Intel's Rapid Storage Technology. I have Write-cache buffer flushing disabled and Write Back Cache Mode enabled.

My Samsung M.2 PCIe SSD runs faster than my two SSDs setup in RAID0.

If above is not a typo, that may be because you can lose some access time with RAID. Run AS SSD to see access times.
Intel should be fine but make sure the array is performing TRIM with trimcheck 0.7

Edit: Hmm, RAID is on another controller? Reading skills 5 minutes after you get up :)

No, it's not a typo, but the formatting of the speeds are off since before I clicked post message, the speed of my RAID0 drives where further under the title. I ran the speed test just before posting. I'll take a look at trimcheck. I didn't know that application even existed, but I'm glad you mentioned it.

Thanks a lot for the help getting my 4TB WD Black drive up and running. This is the largest drive I have, so I guess I'm just not used to seeing such a large amount of space unusable, but it's all relative to the size of the drive. The drives I've been using to store my data are from previous builds, but the drives still worked so I just kept using them. I ran across the UEFI GPT boot drive fiasco whenever I installed my Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD to use as my boot drive and hold my operating system. I install all of my applications on my SSDs, and the 4TB drive will be used to store all of my data, which includes my Windows download directory, desktop, my documents, my pictures, my videos, etc.

Everything is setup and working fine now. The drives are formatted, and I've migrated all the data from the old drives to the new drives. I'm glad forums like this exist. I'll download Trimcheck and the other speed test software you mentioned. One bad thing about running my SSDs in RAID0 is the Samsung Magician software doesn’t recognize the SSDs like it would if they weren't setup in RAID0. The only functionality of the software I can use is the performance check. It doesn't recognize my XP941 drive either, but that's because of how it had to be setup in order to use it as my boot drive, and because it's an OEM drive.