I have a question about HDD's

S

StickClicks5

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 6, 2006
Messages
155
I want to configure duel 250GB HDD SATA in RAID format. I was curious as to how they opperate as such. Are they shown as one massive HD or two seperate ones. And is it hard to parition them? Thanks in advance.
 
It depends what RAID level you'd choose for you dual HDDs. You have two choices:
RAID-0 and RAID-1. The former improves STR while reducing reliability and slightly increasing seek times, while the latter improves reliability while reducing the available storage capacity. Depending on how you set up RAID, i.e. software controller, hardware controller or WinXP dynamic disks, they will show up as a single disk or two disks in Windows XP.
 
There are 2 different levels of raid you can setup with two drives. Level 0 (stripe) gives you cumlative capacity, level 1 (mirror) will give you the capacity of one drive but offers greater uptime.

Once you build the array in the controller for all intents & purposes it is seen as a single drive by the system that can be formatted and partitioned any way you want.

You probably want to start by reading the raid faq in the answers sticky. Much to learn about raid there is... pros and cons each level has </yoda> ;)

edit: damn, beat like a dog!
 
I would recommend against running raid 0. You don't get much performance addition out if it, if anything, and the reliability of the system is much worse. Stick to using them as seperate disks, and put your games on one drive and Windows and apps on the other.

 
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