Quick raid 1 question

CGurrell

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Feb 3, 2014
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Looking at getting a new motherboard for some features like RAID and SATA 3, and I had a little thought.

Could I partition my HDD to get a 120gb section, then take that partition and my Samsung 840 EVO and put them into a raid 1 configuration, whilst leaving the rest of the HDD for other storage,
 
Solution
FoxVoxDK's answer is correct, but I thought I'd explain a little better.

Motherboards that support RAID are doing so below the operating system - the OS doesn't see two drives, it sees one. Its different than going into windows and using windows' "fakeraid" to create a RAID 1 or RAID 0 setup (software RAID).

On teh MoBo, you're doing it at the BIOS level, so the OS literally sees one logical disk. And if the disks aren't the same size, than the extra space on the bigger of the disks is wasted. You can't do anything with it.

For practical purposes, I agree with FoxVoxDK, in that RAID should really only be used for physical disks, as you lose some of its benefits. That said, you COULD use the BIOS to RAID 0 say, two 1TB drives...

Enthusiast Builder

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Jan 17, 2014
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FoxVoxDK's answer is correct, but I thought I'd explain a little better.

Motherboards that support RAID are doing so below the operating system - the OS doesn't see two drives, it sees one. Its different than going into windows and using windows' "fakeraid" to create a RAID 1 or RAID 0 setup (software RAID).

On teh MoBo, you're doing it at the BIOS level, so the OS literally sees one logical disk. And if the disks aren't the same size, than the extra space on the bigger of the disks is wasted. You can't do anything with it.

For practical purposes, I agree with FoxVoxDK, in that RAID should really only be used for physical disks, as you lose some of its benefits. That said, you COULD use the BIOS to RAID 0 say, two 1TB drives. Windows would then see one 2TB drive, which you could logically partition into a 500GB drive D, and a 1.5TB drive E. Or could use software RAID (windows) to take that 2TB drive and make an array with a third drive. But that is silly. Software RAID sucks.
 
Solution

FoxVoxDK

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Hmm, I'm a little worried about how the motherboard controller will react to those vastly different read and write speeds and since I have not tried what you're doing, I'm afraid that I'm a little in over my head here. I ALWAYS use two of the exact same disks for my arrays.

My experimental side of me would say try, then run crystaldiskmark or other Read/write test program on the array and see if you lose performance.