Can I partition 1 hard drive into 2 drives and mirror it.

geland0309

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I want to install a new poweredge r710 server that came with 6 physical drives (4 - 1TB and 2 - 250G). I want to mirror my C: drive and also i have t x y z drives from old server. I also I want to mirror my x and y which is my database folder(driver). Can I partition 1TB for x and y and mirror it and t z (users drives) and mirror it? Any thoughts? Thanks
 

geland0309

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Thanks Ubrales. So two separate drives for x and y, and other 2 for mirror? total of four. If i mirror all 5 drives do i need total of ten since i cannot partition them?
 
You can create a RAID volume and then partition that volume inside the operating system. For example, if you take two 1TB drives and mirror them to create a RAID-1 volume with 1TB of capacity, you can then partition the 1TB into two 500GB logical drives ("D:", and "E:" if you're using Windows, for example)

The key is that you set the RAID volume up first, and then you take the resulting space and partition it.
 

geland0309

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Thanks for the clear answer sminlal. So for instance, i have 1 TB - I want to partition that to create my a and b (500GB) drive and i will mirror that to another 1TB drive. I mean can i partition my source drive and mirror it to the destination drive? Do I also need to partition my destination drive? Thanks
 
You're thinking about it the wrong way around. You don't create partitions and then mirror them, you create the mirror and then partition it.

So if you have two 1TB drives and you want to use mirroring, you create a mirrored RAID volume from the two drives giving you 1TB of usable space. When you then divide that up into two 500GB partitions (let's call them "D:" and "E:"), you end up with a copy of the "D:" partition on half of the 1st 1TB hard drive and a second copy on half of the 2nd 1TB hard drive. The same applies to the "E:" partition.

You can't start with two non-RAID drives, create a partition on it, and then mirror the partition (well, OK if you're using Windows software mirroring you can, but few people do that these days, especially for servers where considerations like being able to hot swap a drive are important).
 

geland0309

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Again. You made it cyrstal clear. Thanks Sminlal!