Confused about RAID volumes

Quote:

Originally Posted by dextor

Drives in questions are 2x 1TB WD Caviar Blacks.
Motherboard: Gigabyte P55A-UD3

I'm a little confused on creating raid volumes, I want to make a RAID 0 array:

1. Should I create 2 raid volumes, first volume say ~200GB for OS + game/app files (to short stroke), second volume for storage (1800GB)?

2. OR should I create one RAID0 volume of all the 2 TB, and when installing Win7 just create 2 partitions, same sized as above?

3. What if I just create a RAID0 volume of 200GB only? Will the remainder 1800GB not get recognized by Win7? If it does get recognized, how will it show up? As two drives?

4. Can a RAID0 volume of 200GB AND a RAID1 volume of 900GB (1800GB/2 since mirrored) be created? If yes does that negate any beneficial effects of short stroking the RAID0?

Thanks in advance.

I wouldn't bother with RAID-0 at all. For general OS / application / game use, you will see absolutely zero practical benefit from RAID-0. I *especially* would not put any data on a RAID-0 array that you can't afford to lose, like your documents, media, pictures, music, videos, porn, etc.

But to answer your questions:

1. It will not matter. RAID-0 will not have a practical impact on the kinds of application use you described, so it doesn't matter how you partition your disks.

2. I think you are confusing something about RAID... RAID operates at a disk level. A disk is either in a raid array, or not in a raid array. You cannot tell your RAID controller to only add 500GB out of a 1000GB disk to the array.

Once you add disks to the array, you can partition them into separate volumes. But this happens at the partition level, and NOT the disk level (where RAID operates).

3. Yes, you can add your 2x 1TB disks to a RAID-0 array, and partition only the first 200GB of the combined 2TB of space. The remaining 1.8GB will show up as unpartitioned space. Windows will see the unpartitioned space in Disk Management, but will not assign it a drive letter or treat it as useable space until you partition that 1.8GB and format it.

4. You cannot do this. RAID operates at a disk level. You cannot assign the first 100GB as RAID-0, and the remaining 900GB in RAID-1. You must assign the entire 1TB disk to either a RAID-0 array, or a RAID-1 array.