G0liath

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May 15, 2009
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I am about to get a 3rd hdd and i have never used raid before. I have a 200 GB SATA 1 drive a 250 GB sata 2 drive and (soon) a 500 GB sata 2 drive.

Can i make identical sized partition on all 3 drives and set up some kind of raid 0 on them ? Or do all drives need to be the same size for this to work ? What will happen to the rest of the space i got left on the bigger drives ?


Assuming im not wrong about raid 0 - the one where data is shared among drives to get better performance.

I don't know if u need to know this tho u might need to ... currently im using the beta ver of win 7 x64... i can change back to vista x64 if the OS gives me problems and my mobo is (soon) Gigabyte GA790FXT.
 

wuzy

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Jun 1, 2009
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With Intel Matrix RAID you can, but not with AMD southbridges found in GA790FXT.
Also RAID 0 does not automatically mean better performance. Only under ideal circumstances like moving large sequential chunks of data e.g. video editing will you benefit from its increased performance. With typical daily Windows random read/write, hardly.

And of course with RAID 0 if one drives fails all data is lost. That means potentially 600GB worth of data for what you've planned.
Just use the drive individually and install Windows on the fastest of the three drives.