Raid 1 & Raid 0 with only 2 disks

[Ruminari]

I'm migrating to a new system and I'm looking at setting up a Raid setup. I'm going AM2 with a 570 Ultra chipset, so it will be an onboard Nvidia raid setup. I want at least part of the setup to be redundant so that I won't loose everything if a drive fails.

My computer usage background - Do a fair amount of 3D modeling and Digital imaging work, then of course I got to get in a good gaming session on a fairly regular basis.

1. I was looking strongly at the Raid 5 and using 3 WD 320GB. However, from my research I've found that the write performance is awful and they can burden the processor. Additionally, I would have to buy a 3rd drive.

2. I was looking to just go Raid 1 so that everything was redundant, however I'm halfing my available data and not getting any performance increases.

3. Raid 0 is basically out of the question as I want redundancy.

4. Would it be possible to partition the (2) 320 GB drives so that 100GB of each was Raid 0 (for the apps, scratch disks, and boot drive) then use the remainder of the drives as a Raid 1 for the data redundancy. So that would end up giving me 200GB of Raid 0 and about 200GB of Raid 1. Would this setup be stable and afford data redundancy along with having good performance? Is there any reason not to do this type of setup?

Thanks for your help.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

That exact scenario is called Matrix RAID, but is only supported by Intel ICH 7R and 8R southbridges, typically paired with the 975X and 965P northbridges, respectively.

The 570 Ultra chipset does not have this capability.

 

[Ruminari]

Are there any other AM2 chipsets which support Matrix Raid? or what I'm trying to achieve?

 

[MU_Engineer]

You should be able to do this with other kinds of software RAID too. (That's all that Intel Matrix RAID is.) What Intel Matrix RAID does is run RAID on partitions on your HDD and not entire HDDs. Linux md RAID does this too, and I think some other software RAID controllers do this as well.