Is my Raid 0 working correctly?

Mx772

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So after one of my mates pointed out that I have two drives shown in "My Computer" that I couldn't be running them in Raid0.
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So of course I looked up some more details and was told to go into Rapid Store and it showed that they were indeed Raid 0
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And lastly to look into the computer management section
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So my main questions are,
1. Is my raid 0 working as I have 2 volumes, yet they seem to be under one partition?
2. Is it possible to have both of those under one "volume/partition/drive" and just have them be C: with 912gb instead of two separate saving options.
 
Solution
Your drives are indeed in raid 0. You just happen to have the logical drive setup into two partitions and thus why windows shows two "drives"

You can right click on D and destroy the partition and then right click on C and then pick extend to create a single coherent partition.

Edit - So I guess I should mention.......make sure anything you want saved on D is moved elsewhere before you destroy it.

Kraszmyl

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Your drives are indeed in raid 0. You just happen to have the logical drive setup into two partitions and thus why windows shows two "drives"

You can right click on D and destroy the partition and then right click on C and then pick extend to create a single coherent partition.

Edit - So I guess I should mention.......make sure anything you want saved on D is moved elsewhere before you destroy it.
 
Solution

Mx772

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So just to bounce off of this, trying to understand everything here, logical drives in this case are just like a imaginary drive, but in reality its both of the hard drives doing raid 0 and splitting the ~1tb into imaginary smaller partitions for ease of use?
 

cdpage

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think of it this way. if you only had 1 drive, you could partition it into two (or more) drives.

RAID 0 is like taking all the platters from all your drives (two in this case) and making them act as 1 drive.
It's a faster method of read/write because it has many platters to read/write to at the same time. think more arms and surface area... there is more to it than that though.

 

Kraszmyl

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Close enough. You have the right idea. Normally I'm not a fan of Wikipedia but their raid article is pretty good if you want to know more.

 

USAFRet

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In this case, it is simply two partitions on *1* physical drive. C and D. There is one physical disk...Disk 0.
How this ended up in a RAID 0 config? Unknown. But it serves zero purpose.

 

Kraszmyl

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Firstly there are two physical drives where are combined into a single logical drive which is then split into two partitions.

Secondly there are an assortment of reasons to run a configuration like this. Recent example I setup for my father would be is he likes having two partitions. One is setup for windows and one is setup for everything else. Generally its like a 50g one for windows and the programs folders and user files and what not are mapped back to the second partition. He also has a raid 0 setup because 500g ssds didn't exist when he got his 256g ones.

This allows him to tinker with his windows install and break whatever and then reinstall in literally minutes at this point with the ssds+usb3.

I don't exactly agree with the setup but it is a logical and thought out process.

There are an assortment of other scenarios where partitioning out a raid 0 make sense and while I would agree 552g and 368g are odd im sure some one had a reason to serve a purpose even if it is a weird one.

edit - also if that is an oem machine , many oem installers such as asus automatically divide the drive into two partitions for better or worse.
 

USAFRet

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OK.
C of 552GB, and D of 368GB. Equaling around 920GB.
The RST window show 2 drives of probably 500GB each.

Overhead, etc...thats about right.
 

Mx772

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You are correct about the oem, it's an MSI laptop. I know how RAID and such works, just couldn't figure out why the heck they would partition it like that and thought maybe it was semi screwed up (MSI laptops kinda have a reputation for that, actually more msi in general tbh) but I also figured out that changing these default partitions without actually changing your storage device, such as adding an ssd, which I plan to do and why this question came up, it can screw up some of the default msi programs and sometimes cause issues with updating bios. Was reading online and many people had problems with this.
 

Kraszmyl

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That's what I figured. MSI machines hardware wise are fine if clunky in my opinion. You're right about the software being wonky with MSI but frankly besides the OSD related stuff chances are you don't need any of the MSI software and can go strait to the hardware vendors for stuff.