Raid Mirroring Question

[Bigbacon]

With raid in mirroring mode,
can you still partition the drives that are in raid mode?
Do the drives need to be exactly the same?
Does mirroring slow anything dow?
Is raid a pain in the ass to setup and use and what can go wrong?

I am thinking of setting up a mirrored raid array on my system as I just had a hard drive failure on my OS drive. Hoping that this may help in the future if something similar happens.

 

[maven]

can you still partition the drives that are in raid mode?

RAID appears to the OS as a single volume; two mirrored drives would like like a single disk

Do the drives need to be exactly the same?

It shouldn't, but it may depend on the controller. The controller should allow all disks in each RAID volume to take on the capacity of the smallest disk used.

Does mirroring slow anything dow?

Depends on which RAID type you're using and again, it may depend on the controller. In general mirrored pairs shouldn't result in any noticeable depredation (or performance increase) compared to the slowest of the two drives used.

Is raid a pain in the ass to setup and use and what can go wrong?

Depends on the controller. As far as what can go wrong - its another added level of complexity.

 

[BikePilot]

I have software raid running on my SFF box, it was very easy to setup and works just like a single drive as far as user interface you'd never know the difference. I used two identical drives so can't say if it would matter if you used different drives.

I got very slightly improved read performance with RAID-1 and otherwise no change.

As for what can go wrong, I hope not to find out