RAID 0 with different disc sizes?

[uviuar2]

I was wondering if it is possible to allocate the remaining storage space when you have unequal disc sizes as a secondary partition for storage?

Drive 1 = 80gig
Drive 2 = 500gig

Striped array = 80gig
Format remaining 420gig on drive 2 as secondary disc partition with no RAID functionality.

Is this possible?

[Demon10000]

I don't believe it's possible with Hardware RAID controllers. You might be able to do something with software raid. However, I'm sure you're going with a stripe for speed, so you're going to want to use a hardware raid controller.

[uviuar2]

Yea, I have an nForce3 chipset with the integrated hardware RAID. But it can also use nvidia's software RAID configurator dubbed MediaShield. I have yet to experiment with this. Basically I purchased a 500gig harddrive a couple years ago for my HTPC, and even then I still didnt use up all the storage. I have enough leftover storage to throw the drive into my gaming rig and stripe the free space into my existing 80gig drive. I'll give it a shot and see what happens, currently resizing the partitions for the last 8 hours.

[uviuar2]

Ok as expected this did not work at all, and windows can only see the drives as a single unit defined by the array, giving me a max 80gig partition. I could partition this any which way I like but obviously 500gigs->80gigs is a terrible waste. Further more research indicates very little gain unless you are doing mass file transfers, so I think I'll just keep using the space for disk images/files etc.

[xxEIEIOxx]

Just to add my 2 cents, as you discovered it is a horrible waste of space, but can be done. You can RAID 0 just about any 2 drives, but they will always be as slow as the slowest drive and as small as twice the size of the smallest drive (the smaller drive plus the same amount on the larger one.)

[GushpinBob]

You could probably get away with a JBOD or concatenated disks configuration if storage is more of an issue to you over speed.