RAID partitions or only whole disks?

[WyomingKnott]

I am under the impression that when you set up RAID, you have to allow the controller to take storage in entire disk chunks. Specifically, you can't make two partitions on a drive, use one for part of a RAID set, and put a normal NTFS volume on the other.

Is the use of partitions for RAID storage impossible, common, or rare and limited to certain controllers? If possible, include a link to the relevant manual, so I can learn a little more.

Thank you.

 

[sminlal]

I'm pretty sure that the fellow in the other post who wanted to partition his RAID volume was talking about first creating a RAID volume from the physical drives, and then partitioning the resulting logical volume so as to use only the first part of it. If you use only the first 25% of the logical RAID volume then you'll end up only using the first 25% of the cylinders on each physical disk.

 

[WyomingKnott]

I'm pretty sure that the fellow in the other post who wanted to partition his RAID volume was talking about first creating a RAID volume from the physical drives, and then partitioning the resulting logical volume so as to use only the first part of it. If you use only the first 25% of the logical RAID volume then you'll end up only using the first 25% of the cylinders on each physical disk.

True, but I'm asking this as a general question, not in support of that particular inquiry.

 

[sminlal]

I don't know of any hardware-level RAID implementation that can put existing disk partitions together into a RAID set because they all work at the physical sector level and ignore higher-level data structures like partition tables.

But software RAID can do it.

 

[Joeyb8775]

I'm pretty sure that the fellow in the other post who wanted to partition his RAID volume was talking about first creating a RAID volume from the physical drives, and then partitioning the resulting logical volume so as to use only the first part of it. If you use only the first 25% of the logical RAID volume then you'll end up only using the first 25% of the cylinders on each physical disk.

This is an outstanding bit of information. Extremely useful. Good work by you sminlal.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Best answer selected by WyomingKnott.