I think you had it here "After selecting Create VD, and selecting the drive, and giving the VD a name, I proceed to press OK, and then I get the message that it is recommended that I initialize the drive first."   It is going to create the RAID0 Virtual disk and the recommendation is to initialize it before use in the OS. You can initialize it with OMSA, Controller BIOS or use the Windows Disk Management. You would Initialize a Virtual Disk after it is created.   This may help : Configuring RAID 5 Virtual Disk using Server Administrator - Dell OMSA It shows creating a RAID5 you would just select RAID0 and the steps should be the same and you only select the 900G drive. Start at the 51 second mark [URL]   For using the controller BIOS and can look this over  : Steps for creating and initializing a virtual array [URL]
On our PowerEdge T320 ( ) I ran a benchmark test on our RAID 5 with 3 Dell Savvio 10K.6 300GB drives.  The maximum speed was 390.1 MB/s The average speed was 258.1 MB/s The minimum speed was 0.1 MB/s [IMAGE]Benchmark Test Running a quick surface scan, I noticed around the last few GBs (570-591 GBs out of 598 GBs) the read speed would drop significantly from like 250 to around 10-30 MB/s and would appear to hang from a few seconds to almost 1 minute sometimes trying to read, though it never did time out. After completion, it reported "No errors or bad sectors found." I have also ran a Consistency Check on the drives, and it reported no issues as well. Obviously, there is an issue though with one of the drives, but how would I investigate or find out which drive of the 3 is the culprit? The RAID controller reports everything is fine, it was only when I ran this Benchmark test that I noticed this issue with the last 20 GBs or so. Is there an easy way to tell if there is even any data on those sectors? We are only using about 135 GBs of the 598 GBs I'm planning to add a 4th drive to this RAID, as I was under the impression it could increase the read speed by 15 to 30%, Does anyone have an opinion on whether or not I should do this? Below are snippets of other tests I ran for anyone who might see a pattern here, and maybe offer a suggestion or recommendation. [IMAGE]Random Access Test[IMAGE]Extra Tests
How Do You Identify Which Drive in a RAID is NOT Measuring Up