Raid Advice

ndeller

ndeller

ndeller

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Joined
18 Nov 2007
Posts
104
Okay so Im thinking of doing the following:

HDD1 (500GB):
50GB XP (stripped)
200GB Data (mirrored)
50GB Server 2003 (stripped)
50GB Games (stripped)

HDD2 (500GB):
50GB XP (stripped)
200GB Data (mirrored)
50GB Server 2003 (stripped)
50GB Games (stripped)

So in effect I have:
100GB XP
200GB Data (with the backup mirrored version)
100GB Server 2003
100GB Games

If I was going to do this what is the best way forward?
From what I can understand I will need to do the following:
Purchase Floppy drive and isntall
Create ICHxR Raid boot disk
Format both HDD's
Boot with ICHxR and create 3 stripped and 1 mirror partition.

Both drives should be left as Basic format? If I do it this way will I be able to dual boot between XP and Server 2003?

Also just to confirm is this called Matrix raid (striping and mirroring together)?

Thanks
 
I have 2 500GB drives.

I want to partition each of the 2 drives into 4 sections:
XP(Striped), Games(striped), Server 2003(striped), Data(mirrored)
 
You cant stripe and mirror with only 2 drives. When you set up raid you do it for the physical drives not the individual partitions within them, so if you have a striped array to run XP off, you cant have a partition on it mirrored. You gonna have to do one or the other to the whole thing I'm afraid, or get more drives
 
correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't think that's possible, as far as I know RAID disks can't be partitioned into different areas.

striping and mirroring together drive's is RAID 1+0 aka RAID 10
 
oh right, I thought you could do.
Can a drive in Raid format have any partitions on it at all? So as long as you are mirrioring by itself cna you still have partitions.
 
Yeah, you can still create as many partitions as you want, but they are all in the same raid mode, it is the disks themselves rather than the partitions that run in raid, so anything on the disk will be in the same raid mode as the disks are
 
So in order to get my data mirrored I would in theory have to get 2 additional hard drives?

Hmmm not sure I will both with raid then. Just seems like a whole lot of hassle.
 
That is one option, or one extra larger drive to mirror the whole stripe (I think its called raid 10, but I've never used it so I cant really comment on that), or simply stripe the whole lot, I supppose it just depends how important your data is...
 
Yeah I think if I do anything I will simply stripe the drives because to be honest If its really important I backup to my external hard drive and if extra extra important I backup to dvd as well
 
I went rom a RAID-0 setup 110MB/s average) to a single drive (78MB/s) and notice no difference in speed with most things.

And why do you need a 100GB XP partition? XP fits on a 15GB partition with ease, I even have a 15GB Vista partition with 6GB free.
 
BENdage said:
You cant stripe and mirror with only 2 drives. When you set up raid you do it for the physical drives not the individual partitions within them, so if you have a striped array to run XP off, you cant have a partition on it mirrored. You gonna have to do one or the other to the whole thing I'm afraid, or get more drives
Click to expand...
If the OP is using (and it sounds like he is) one of the Intel Matrix RAID controllers then it's perfectly possible to mix RAID levels between the drives in exactly the manner he's looking to do.
 
rpstewart said:
If the OP is using (and it sounds like he is) one of the Intel Matrix RAID controllers then it's perfectly possible to mix RAID levels between the drives in exactly the manner he's looking to do.
Click to expand...

How can it do this if he doesn't have the correct number of drives? Stripe + Mirror requires 4 drives.
 
It does have it's disadvantages though - you still only have two disks so copying from one array to another is still going to be slow due to the extra head moves.
 
Aha, I thought it was possible with Intel-Matrix Raid, thanks for confirming this rpstewart.

Raid of partitions is gonna be very handy
 
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