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is raid 0+1 possible with only 2 hdd

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I have been thinking about setting up my pc with 2, 300gb hdd in raid 0, but I don’t like the idea of one hdd kicking the bucket and all my data lost and I don’t wanna put down the $$$ for 4 hdd to have a raid 0+1 setup. so my dilemma got me thinking. Now I doubt this would work but I'd like to hope it can so that’s why I’m asking all you people smarter than me.

Is it possible to set up a raid 0+1 with only 2 hdd? I think I have a solution to this but as I said I doubt it would work.

What I was thinking of doing was getting 2 300gb hdd and partitioning them in half. So like a C D E F hard drives in windows where C and E are one hdd and D and F are the other. Stripe C to D and E to F (for performance) then Mirror C-D to E-F (for data safety) so that if on hdd fails the performance is lost but not the data because one hdd will have all the data on it and it will basically raid 0 with it self when the other hdd fails. If I lost you in that I’m sorry, but if anyone knows the answer to if this would work please post. A yes or a no would be sufficient but if you’d like to tell me I’m a genius or that I really need to lay off the booze feel free to do so, I won’t care I’d just like an answer.

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I dont think its possible. Not to mention, if it was possible, you would be creating one heck of a bottle nect on the drives. You would be trying to right to both hard drives for the strip and the mirror drive all at the same time. Big bottle neck which would kill your speeds, thus negating the advantage of stripping.
As far as I know you cant have a drive be in a mirror and strip array at the same time.
Plus think of it this way. If the drive with the mirror image goes out you still lose all your data because it is in a strip array plus has the mirror image on it. You lose it all.
Best to just get 3 drives and do it correctly.

Raid 0 can be done on 2 Hd's, Raid 1 can be done on 2 Hd's, but Raid 0+1 requires 4 Hd's min (and they will all be striped to match the smallest size so try and keep them all the same).

Raid 5, however, can be done on 3 drives.

When thinking in terms of RAID, think physical disks, not logical disks. RAID 0+1 requires 4 disks minium. RAID 5 can be done with three but will only give you the capacity of one and a half. I don't like RAID 0 because it has no fualt tollerance and with each disk you add you increase your chances of failure. If you want to have fualt tollerance buy two 400GB or 500GB drives and set them up in a RAID 1. that will be less then three 300GB disks in a RAID 5 and give you more storage.

Or do what I did:

WD Raptor 74GB as the system drive
2x320GB Special WD RAID drives that make up my RAID 1

thanks for all the help and I think im just gonna go with 2 300 gb sata 2 hdd in raid 1. Hopefully 300 gb will be enuff plus i already have a 160 gb sata 1 hdd running my pc now and a 300gb removable ide hdd used for backing up data so i think my butt will be coverd on data loss due to hdd loss. (I wish I had something to cover my lost 2gb pen drive I missplaced the other day, damn you dont know what you have untill you loose it)

We had a thread on this a while back, but I think the discussion was probably buried in another one. Short answer - yes you can do it, but it'll probably bottleneck and suck.

notes: its not relaly RAID 0+1 you're talking about - its more like RAID 0 and RAID 1 on 2 physical HDD's and 4 logical partitions. No real designation for that.
Intel's MATRIX tech does what you're looking for, but I haven't seen any benchmarks on how it stacks up to just doing it yourself w/ a RAID controller.

If you have the time, try it out for kicks. I doubt you'll like the performance though.
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