Creating partitions before a RAID

[rbertl]

I recently purchased a 640 gig and a 1 tb hard drive. I want to enable RAID on both hard drives, but I need to partition each into equal halves before I do so. Is there a way to partition before I start the windows installation (in which the raid needs to be set up prior)? If so, how?


Also, does windows vista 64 bit auto detect and install RAIDs? Or does it resemble XP in which you need to load the drivers for the RAID off say a floppy?

 

[arkadi]

Unfortunately your question is incomplete....
If you will answer few questions it can help readers to answer all your questions.
1 - what main board you have.
2 - what raid you want to use, and how you want to partition your storage?
You have two options, raid 0 for speed, but it less reliable, if one drive fail you will lose all the data on that array.
Raid 1 it will save your data if one drive fails, but you will lose the size of the array from the second drive, and it not be faster than single drive.
As for drivers, Vista 64 will support majority of the chip sets, but not them all.
Please post your computer hardware configuration.
Thanks

 

[rbertl]

Motherboard/CPU
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2
intel core i7 920

Storage
WD 640GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache
WD 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache

I want to use RAID0. I've never had a HDD fail on me so this seems safe enough for me.

I essentially want to split the 640 GB one into two 320 GB partitions and RAID them. This drive would be used for programs/OS. The second one I intend to do the same thing with, except it is intended for data.

Would this work, or is it advised that I have 2 physically separate HDDs when using a RAID?

 

[arkadi]

Please read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
It will help you to understand what Raid is.
Then ask your question again
Best of Luck

 

[rbertl]

I've read about them extensively and understand theoretically how they work.

I'm not sure how I'm being unclear.

Supposing I had 4 HDDs, would it be possible to create 2 separate RAID0 arrays (both of course using 2 HDDs each and being of equal size)?

Now, if that IS possible, couldn't I take 2 HDDs and partition them in such a way that they are seen as 4 HDDs, then set up 2 RAID0 arrays?

The step AFTER that would be designating one of these arrays for data and one of them for programs/Windows.

Is that a little more clear?