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The Myth box here is our most recently set-up system with RAID.
It has two 300GB drives, each of which has a small 8GB partition, and a huge 292GB partition.


This is a good idea in general with software raid. Try not to use the entire disk up, so that when it comes time to replace a failed disk, you don't have issues with a replacement disk offering slightly less space. IE, the Seagate 300GB drive offers 284GB of usable space, while the Maxtor 300GB may only offers 283GB of usable space. For my Linux server, I always created the partitions then told the raid side to use those, over using the entire disk. Another advantage of software raid is the usable space on larger drives. I added a 500gb drive to my server a few months back, and used 160gb of it to add to my raid 5. The rest of the space I have shared out for storing large system backups from my machines, backups that don't need raid protection since they are already the second copy of the data.

HP's storage group requests that custom firmware be put on the drives they buy from vendors to equalize this, so that any 250GB disk has the exact same usable space, no matter who the vendor is. It ends up helping later too, since vendors may even change the disk to a newer model later with a different amount of usable space.