Two RAID drives on only two hard disks...

It's such a good idea, it's already been implemented. Intel calls this "Matrix Raid" and supports it on their RAID-enabled chipsets.

Thank you for the information. I didn't know what "matrix raid" is... I had ignorantly thought it's just a fancy name Intel coined...  

Actually I do have my boot drive on two 80 gb RAID 0 and my data on two 500 gb RAID 1, plus one other 500 gb (single) is my backup disk. I was thinking of replacing my boot drives with new and faster drives. The problem seems to be the fastest drives seem to start with 500 gb., a capacity I don't need... Guess I can use the rest for additional backup or other data space…

Try Matrix Raid you'll like it. You can adjust Raid 0 & Raid 1 to custom sizes to what ever fits your needs. The great thing is that it is transportable to other Intel (RAID)Chipset Moptherboards.

Yes, its called RAID 0+1 or Matrix RAID. However, RAID 0 gives performance benefits because 2 physical drives are working at the same time to read and write data.. much like 2 people painting a house, effectively doubling the speed. Matrix RAID basically eliminates all speed advantages of RAID 0 because the hard drives are also writing the mirrored part of the data at the same time, so its basically worthless.

RAID 0 is like 2 painters painting a house, using both hands (4 hands painting). RAID 1 would be 1 painter painting the house with both hands and the other painter standing next to him and watching (2 hands painting). RAID Matrix would be like 2 painters painting with 1 hand tied behind thier backs (2 hands painting).

Cirdecus,
I had thought RAID 0+1 was a RAID 0 pair mirrored by another RAID 0 set. That is having the best of both worlds: RAID 0 performance at RAID 1 safety. Penalty is having to utilize 4 hard disks.

But what I propose different. In that case boot RAID 0 is not mirrored, it does not have any of the safety of RAID 1 partition. But the data section is RAID 1

If a drive fails and Matrix RAID can rebuild just the partition of the good drive, or treat partition of the good drive as a stand alone drive, then it is a pretty good set up. BTW as long as there is nothing going on across the partitions then the performance will be close to RAID 0 for R/W. The controller may slow things down some vs. as standalone RAID 0. Anything read from the RAID 1 partion will be nearly as fast as RAID 0, the writes will be at standard speed. Any cross partition R/W will probably slow both drives down to close to standard speeds and give the controller and drives a real workout.

Kursun,
it doesn't really matter if RAID 0 on such an array is not mirrored because both arrays exist on the same physical drive. So the drives must be doing all the work to keep both RAID 0 and 1 synced at the same time, so it's like doing twice the work, negating the benefits of having that RAID 0 array on there in the first place.

I haven't personally tested such a setup yet though, so I can't comment on how much that would affect performance. I'm sure you can find a review of Matrix Raid somewhere.

Not at all correct. Matrix RAID and RAID 0+1 are two completely different and separate things.

RAID 0+1 is a nested RAID level that builds two separate mirrored RAID sets and then stripes data across them. The result appears as one virtual drive.

Matrix RAID is a mechanism where you can have a RAID 0 array and a completely separate RAID 1 array (which normally would require 4 disks) but instead only 2 disks are used. The result is two virtual drives, one that is RAID 0 and one that is RAID 1.



Matrix RAID can indeed rebuild the RAID 1 section on a drive failure. The data on the RAID 0 section is lost (as it ordinarily would be when a drive fails). The RAID 0 section does not suffer any performance hit. The RAID 1 section will have read and write speeds approximately equal to that of a single drive, the Intel chipset does not have the ability to increase RAID 1 read speed - it is not as intelligent as enterprise-level RAID controllers which typically can. Be careful of the terminology you use here - the two different sections of the drives are not partitions - partitions are file-system level entities. The sections that comprise the different RAID areas are logical volumes.



The RAID 0 section and RAID 1 section don't have anything to do with each other, and don't "sync". The RAID 0 section performs as a RAID 0 drive would, and the RAID 1 section performs as a RAID 1 drive would.

Does the ASUS Maximus Extreme support Matrix Raid? Where can I find that information? Thanks.