RAID 0 - 2 Partition prolblem

[Strider]

Hi Guys,

I've got 3x36.7gb raptors in RAID 0, and I've been told if you want to install Vista and XP as a dual boot (Vista didn't like being on the same partition as XP), you need to do it on a seperate partition.

I want to create 2 partitions on the RAID, but I want to know if two paritions (one for each OS) are created on the RAID of 3 drives would the paritions be set up as either;

The first paritition would occupy the first drive and half of the second (the second would therefore occupy the other of the second drive, and all of the third)

or would each partition take up exactly half of each drive in the RAID? (ie the xp partition, would take up the first half of each, and vista would take up the second half)

How would the RAID work in this case?

Cheers in advance =)

 

[Trippynet]

I don't think you quite understand how RAID 0 works. The controller stripes the info in small blocks across the drives. The size of these blocks depends on the configuration. Let's just say that they're 32k blocks. Hence for a file which is 96k in size, it's split into 3 blocks, one of which is on each drive. This speeds up access to this data as these 3 blocks can be read simultaneously from different drives. The OS etc however, just treats the RAID as one big disk. It doesn't care that a 50MB file is split into thousands of blocks of data which are striped across 3 physical drives at all. The same applies to partitions.

As for partitioning, both partitions will be striped across all 3 disks, hence a third of each partition will be on each drive, but striped with the other drives. The OS though will just treat it as if it were 2 partitions on a 114GB drive.

Or to put it another way, don't worry about it, just partition the RAID and it'll all be fine.

 

[rpstewart]

EDIT: Too slow

 

[Strider]

Cool, cheers for that, I understand that the raid controller stripes a file accross the 3 disks on a single partition, but I just wanted to check with a pro before I re-install windows again =D.

Just hope this install of vista runs okay.