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Striping across 3 volumes

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  • SSD
  • Storage
  • NAS / RAID
Last response: in Storage
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October 17, 2013 9:01:29 PM

Could I potentially stripe across 3 volumes on two disks? I currently have one 120gb ssd, and I wanted to make a raid array with another ssd but larger (240 perhaps). Could I create 3 striped volumes with 120gb spread across the two disks? Theoretically, I'd end up with 3 volumes with 360gb of storage. Although I can already see a host of problems with memory corruption down the line...

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a c 93 G Storage
October 17, 2013 9:11:09 PM

Savvy_01 said:
Could I potentially stripe across 3 volumes on two disks? I currently have one 120gb ssd, and I wanted to make a raid array with another ssd but larger (240 perhaps). Could I create 3 striped volumes with 120gb spread across the two disks? Theoretically, I'd end up with 3 volumes with 360gb of storage. Although I can already see a host of problems with memory corruption down the line...


It is certainly possible to spread RAID volumes across disks of differing sizes but there are some constraints.

A RAID0 (striping) array is constrained by the smallest volume in the array. In this case, it will be constrained by the single 120GB volume on your 120GB SSD. It can be striped with a 120GB volume on your 240GB SSD for a logical 240GB striped volume. This will leave 120GB of uncommitted space on your second SSD which can be exposed as a 120GB non-member volume just as you desire.

Many RAID controllers support this (it's often called Matrix RAID) but I'm not sure if Intel's firmware controller is among them.

With the above in mind, putting SSDs in RAID is often useless. The internal bandwidth of the root ports often becomes the limiting factor, especially with high performance SSDs.
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October 17, 2013 9:45:49 PM

Thanks man, I think I'll make my second ssd an extended volume then. Bonus questions: is it possible to make an extended partition across 2 ssds and 2 HDDs? Second, I have several non-steam games and programs installed on my ssd. If I backed them up and reinstalled win7 on my current ssd, would I be able to play them? I'm not actually changing any hardware so I assume it would work.
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a c 93 G Storage
October 21, 2013 7:08:19 AM

Savvy_01 said:
Thanks man, I think I'll make my second ssd an extended volume then. Bonus questions: is it possible to make an extended partition across 2 ssds and 2 HDDs? Second, I have several non-steam games and programs installed on my ssd. If I backed them up and reinstalled win7 on my current ssd, would I be able to play them? I'm not actually changing any hardware so I assume it would work.


It's possible to create a RAID volume that spans both an SSD and an HDD but you would lose the benefit of having an HDD and it may very well break TRIM support, so I wouldn't do it.
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