can you partition a stripe hard drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mystical
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M

Mystical

Hi
I have two SATA 160GB drives and i want to Stripe (RAID) 300GB the
remainder i want as a separate partition 20GB. Is this possible?
How is it done, is it via the bios or Win XP hard disk manager?
I will be using a GA-K8NXP-9 Socket 939 nForce 4 Ultra PCI-E ATX.
TIA
Martin
 
Mystical said:
Hi
I have two SATA 160GB drives and i want to Stripe (RAID) 300GB the
remainder i want as a separate partition 20GB. Is this possible?
How is it done, is it via the bios or Win XP hard disk manager?
I will be using a GA-K8NXP-9 Socket 939 nForce 4 Ultra PCI-E ATX.
TIA
Martin
Click to expand...

You can RAID0 the two disks and then create any partitions you want on the
resulting space.
It depends on your raid controller what tool is used but the disk manager is
usually recommended.
 
Hi
I have two SATA 160GB drives and i want to Stripe (RAID) 300GB the
remainder i want as a separate partition 20GB. Is this possible?
Click to expand...

Yes. Once you set up a RAID array, that array is handled as
a single "drive", proceed accordingly.

How is it done, is it via the bios or Win XP hard disk manager?
Click to expand...

How far along is the process so far?
What are you using to implement the RAID, ie- a RAID
controller of some sort, yes?

I will be using a GA-K8NXP-9 Socket 939 nForce 4 Ultra PCI-E ATX.
TIA
Martin
Click to expand...

After the bios POST there should be a short screen
displaying something like "press (some key)" to enter the
RAID setup. You'd need the drives attached of course and if
you have any data it needs backed up first, will be lost
upon creating the array.

Enter that menu and create the array. You then have 320GB
(pseudo GB due to HDD manufacturer's definition of a GB)
volume that appears just like a single drive would, that you
can use, partition any way you want to do it, just as if you
only had a single drive. The RAID controller makes the fact
that there are multiple drives, transparent to anything done
from that point onward. Anything you can do with XP to a
single drive can be done to the multi-drive array as well.
 
If you use hardware RAID i.e. a RAID adapter the two drives appear to the OS as one large drive and you can create as many partitions as you want.
If you use software RAID i.e. hard disk manager you need to create matching partitions on each drive and use disk manager to combine them into a RAID partition. I once had a software RAID 0 partition with WinNT spread across three drives and it worked pretty well. You can boot and load your OS from hardware RAID partitions but not from a software RAID partition.
 
Thanks for the info.
If i remember correctly, on POST a sceen will appear to set up RAID. My
only concern with RAID 0 is it is non fault tolerant. So if one disk
fails all DATA is gone...so i believe.

So the plan is create a 300 GB fast RAID 0 for the operagind system +
apps and video editing on drive C:
I then would like to create a separate 20 GB partitioned drive D: (non
raid).

The plan, is if drive C fails (RAID 0)......drive D will be still intack
with all saved DATA.
Can this be done???....if not will it mean that if any of the disks
becomes corrupt you loose the lot?
Click to expand...


No it can't be done. There may be some fancy new schemes
developed by Intel to use RAID arrays in non-tranditional
setups but you'll have to look into whether your board
supports anything "unusual". The standard and by far common
& typical RAID controllers assign per-drives, that is, you
are setting up a raid 0 and you choose which drives (the
ENTIRE drive) to assign to it. You can create different
partitions, filesystems, etc, on that array of drives but
you can't just take a part of one or both drives and create
a different array on that space.

If your data is valuable don't use a RAID0 at all, or make
regular backups to some other device(s). Just because you
"can" do something doesn't necessarily mean you should. For
some uses a pair of non-raided drives will be faster than
the pair as a RAID0. You'll have to consider your
most-demanding uses.
 
Hi
I have two SATA 160GB drives and i want to Stripe (RAID) 300GB the
remainder i want as a separate partition 20GB. Is this possible?
How is it done, is it via the bios or Win XP hard disk manager?
I will be using a GA-K8NXP-9 Socket 939 nForce 4 Ultra PCI-E ATX.
TIA
Martin
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info.
If i remember correctly, on POST a sceen will appear to set up RAID. My
only concern with RAID 0 is it is non fault tolerant. So if one disk
fails all DATA is gone...so i believe.

So the plan is create a 300 GB fast RAID 0 for the operagind system +
apps and video editing on drive C:
I then would like to create a separate 20 GB partitioned drive D: (non
raid).

The plan, is if drive C fails (RAID 0)......drive D will be still intack
with all saved DATA.
Can this be done???....if not will it mean that if any of the disks
becomes corrupt you loose the lot?
Regards
Martin
 
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