How to RAID partitions?

blaaislaai

blaaislaai

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Is is possible to RAID two partitions in RAID0 together?

Basically I have 2x 1TB drives,
Want to take 100gb from each and raid them to one 200gb.

Will this work? I have not tried it yet, As I'm not at home.
I know something can be done in Computer management

Thanks
 
Don't know if that is possible.

Basically you can RAID two or more disks, but I dunno about partitions (at this stage).
 
I know that with Novell Netware 3.12 it was possible to have two 250Mb disks and one 500Mb disks, span the two 250Mb's and have the volume on the two 250Mb's mirror the volume on the 500Mb disk.

Not what I would recommend though.
 
You could span them? The OS will then write to one partition and then the next; whereas RAID writes to both disks at the same time (stripe or mirror). The question is why do you want to do this, split a big disk into small parts and then span them??
 
ok,

I just want a part of the drive Raided.

Its not a big problem, would have been cool to raid 2 partitions.

Will google a bit more
 
Worth a try though...

Partition the two drives exactly the same

then try to add the two partitions you want to mirror to whichever manages the mirroring.
 
What you need is something like LVM and not raid. I have used LVM in linux a few times and it's pretty cool technology. I could create one big partition that spanned several drives & partitions.

If you are using MS Windows look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Disk_Manager never used it in a Win environment before so not sure about it's capabilities.
 
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I am running two HDD with two partitions each in RAID (apparently can't do 3 partitions in RAID). However both partitions are running in RAID 1 so it's not the same as your question but when I did the set-up I don't think that it differentiated between RAID 0 and RAID 1 when I created the partitions so it might be possible. However I don't think that it is possible to only RAID one partition and not the rest of the HDD.
 
Wiki's got a good write-up on RAID :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

The most common RAID types :

  • RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed at any given instant. If one disk fails, however, all of the data on the array will be lost, as there is neither parity nor mirroring.
  • RAID 1 mirrors the contents of the disks, making a form of 1:1 ratio realtime backup. The contents of each disk in the array are identical to that of every other disk in the array.
  • RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk. The storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk.
  • RAID 6 (striped disks with dual parity) combines four or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any two disks.
  • RAID 10 (or 1+0) uses both striping and mirroring. "01" or "0+1" is sometimes distinguished from "10" or "1+0": a striped set of mirrored subsets and a mirrored set of striped subsets are both valid, but distinct, configurations.

You can therefore create two RAID 6 arrays, and combine the two with a RAID 1 array.

All the above arrays have their good points, but also their weaknesses. The idea is to select the option which offers a good balance between the safety of your data and access speed.
 
The_Librarian said:
All the above arrays have their good points, but also their weaknesses. The idea is to select the option which offers a good balance between the safety of your data and access speed.
Click to expand...

And RAW versus usable capacity:

RAID0 = 0 loss of RAW (2 x 1TB = 2TB usable space) 0 redundancy
RAID1 = 50% loss of RAW (2 x 1TB = 1TB usable space) 1 redundant disk
RAID5 = 33% loss of RAW (3 x 1TB = 2TB usable space) 1 redundant disk
RAID10/01 = 50% loss of RAW (4 x 1TB = 2TB usable space) 1 redundant disk (although you can lose 2 disks (1 stripe or mirror set depending on the setup) and still access your data, if you lose two of the wrong disks then your volume is gone)
 
this is easy to do via software raid..in server 2000 and up.
i have a few old servers set up as two drives, two partitions on each drive...
first partitions on the two drives are mirrored together, second partitions are striped together..
not the end of the world.
 
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