Windows 2000 and a hard drive limited to 137gb

I recently had the task of installing Windows 2000 Server on a Dell Poweredge SC420 as my RAID server. I have two identical Western Digital 250gb hard drives, one of which I had installed Windows 2000 on. The full capacity was recognized and the install went fine.

Now was the time to install the 2nd identical hard drive and initiate the RAID (software RAID within Windows 2000) sequence of converting the drives to dynamic disks, and setting up the raid. Then Windows was supposed to go about re-syncing the date from the populated drive 0 over to the newly added drive 1.

Here comes the problem. Upon adding drive 1 the capacity only registers as 137gb. But they both drive 0 and drive 1 are identical makes, models, and size? Simple fix :

1. Run regedit.exe
2. Search for My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters
3. Click "New" then "DWORD Value"
4. Call the new entry EnableBigLba
5. Give it a value of 1
6. Reboot the system

Strange that 1 of the drives was recognized for it's full capacity but not the second. Oh well, I guess Windows has its reason.

As for why I decided to create a Windows software RAID solution? I had a similar situation set up with a hardware controller card when one of the drives failed. I was out of luck accessing anything from it or even booting, so I decided to put it in an external USB enclosure to recover the data. No go. The Windows software RAID solution allowed me to do that without a question.

It's a file server, who cares about the extra 5% overhead involved? I'm more concerned with data redundancy.