2 raid's on 2 drives?

[watanabe]

I just got a new lenovo w500 and it came with a 80gb ssd, now I'm looking to get an esata expresscard and an external enclosure, i'm wondering if the following setup would be possible:

-partition the first 33% of each drive, and stripe those together
-take the remaining 66% of each drive, and then mirror those together

ie: with 1TB drives you'd have 2 333gb partitions striped, making a 666gb raid0, then i could run nightly backups to the mirror. stupid?

i realize this wouldn't protect against a hd going bad physically, but in terms of data corruption/etc seems like this may help?

I guess it would be better to just go for a 3 drive raid 5, but how much better?

 

[devil22]

Would be no help at all to mirror to the same drive, any corruption will be replicated across the raid, and a drive failure will wipe out both as well. Just get two smaller drives (like the WD 640GB ones) and use a backup program, or raid if you must.

 

[veritas7]

Just backup to a single volume.

If you need more space, RAID 5/0 three drives of whatever space. There's no purpose for RAIDing two volumes that both reside on the same drive, performance or stability wise, it's much much worse.

 

[hmchk]

I don't know about that... seems like an interesting idea. Perhaps something to look into. You would likely have to find a product that supported partition level RAID (instead of disk). This would likely be a software solution of some sort.

Devil22,
I don't understand your statement. It sounds like you are saying mirrors don't make sense... aka that Raid 1 is useless.

 

[Lazn_Work]

It's called Matrix Raid by Intel, and they support it on their chipsets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Matrix_RAID
"One of the features that Intel Matrix RAID has, which many other RAID implementations lack, is that different areas (e.g. partitions or logical volumes) on the same disk can be assigned to different RAID devices."

But as Devil said, RAID of any type is useless for data corruption, accidental deletion, or virus protection etc etc. That is what Backup is for.

RAID is only (and only, no other purpose at all) to increase Uptime in the event of a drive failure. That is, if a drive dies, you can keep your computer running. It does nothing for data security or redundancy. This is useful in servers etc so that if a drive dies your company is not out of business while you fix the problem.

The side effect of not losing data when a single drive dies is sometimes mistaken by people to be a form of backup or data protection. This is really a side effect of promoting Uptime and for any other type of data loss (most of those being more common than drive failure) RAID is of no use at all. This is why one must do Backup, and RAID is optional.

RAID 0 is not RAID btw. (no redundancy, thus no R, so it is AID at best)