My Dad has finished his system build and is now going through setup. He's got two 250 GB hard drives intended to be striped together in a RAID 0 configuration. The RAID controller ROM, for the Intel ICH9R, allows the creation of two RAID sets on the same physical disks. Is there any benefit to using 2 RAID sets on the same disks versus just partitioning a single RAID set?
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How to partition a RAID 0 set?
(9 posts)
My understanding about RAID 0 is: you create a volume that span across 2 physical hdd, the RAID subsystem then will automatically scatter your data across those 2 hdd, this way, any request for data will be served by 2 hdd instead of one, so u get 'almost double throughput'
If you create volume c and d on those 2 discs, and both volume span across both discs, of course you'll get 'almost double throughput' for both of your volumes
If you are thinking about setting up a RAID 10 on the two disks, you just may as well set it up as a RAID 1 as you will have the same space and performance as a RAID 1, if you plan to set up both as RAID 0 then you should not see much (if any) of a performance hit. But to be honest, I agree with bamsan, get two more drives and set up a RAID 10. By setting up a RAID 0, you basically double the chances of a drive failure (if one drive fails you lose everything on both drives).
Thanks for the replies. Dad is setting up this RAID 0 for performance with an understanding about the decrease in fault tolerance. Like me, he keeps good backups so if one of the RAID drive fails, no important data will be lost.
However, that was not my original question. The RAID controller allows for 2 RAID sets (or volumes) to be created on the two disks. Here is my depiction of the possible options, A and B:
disk0 = 232.5 gigs (250 "GB")
disk1 = 232.5 gigs
Option A:
Volume0 = 2 x 30 gigs (space from disk0 and disk1)
Volume1 = 2 x 202.5 gigs (rest of space from disk0 and disk1)
Option B:
Volume0 = 2 x 232.5 gigs (all space from disk0 and disk1)
In option A, Volume0 at 60 GB would be used as the primary boot partition for Windows. Does anyone think there would be a benefit or a performance hit by using option A?
Sorry, looking back, I was as clear as mud I see, that your Opetion A was my both as RAID 0 option, and my understanding is it would only be a minor performance hit.
Check out the forums on Anandtech, with all the system tweakers and overclockers there I'd bet it's been discussed there (in great detail with much debate lol).
@Scott,
Personally, I don't quite like the idea of installing OS into a decreased-fault-tolerance disc.
I like the option A, but with some changes:
Volume0 : 2x60gb setup as raid1 (mirrored partition)
Volume1 : 2x172.5 as raid0
This way, you'll get a fault tolerance volume for the OS, and a speedy volume for the other stuffs
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