Raid 0 partitioning?

BarGin

Can anyone help me with this please? I have a Dell Dimension 9200 which has two 320GB hard disks combined to make a 640GB partition.

Is it possible to split this into, say, 80GB for the operating system and software with the balance in a separate partition for data?

If so, what is the easiest (cheapest!) way of doing it?

fwor

Can we ask why it's currently set up with RAID 0? Arguably, the (often stated as small) performance gains don't seem to justify the fact that you are halving your reliability (failure of either drive will destroy the array).

AFAIK, you should be able to partition the 640GB volume exactly as you like, so yes, you could have a partition for the OS and the rest for other data.

If it were mine and the criterion were not "maximum space", I would turn off RAID, partition one drive with 80GB for OS/apps and 240GB for user data, and image it onto the second drive every week as a backup.

paddyrg

Do what fwor says - raid0 is a silly idea for a lappy.

BarGin

Thanks for the replies. It's not a laptop, it's a Dell desktop machine and it came with the raid configuration. I am tempted to just have it as 2 separate drives but I'm not sure how to achieve that.

fwor

I don't know how Dell implement RAID on that model, but I'd guess it's "Fake RAID" (done in software rather than hardware), and that it is probably configured in the BIOS setup pages.

Be aware that as soon as you turn it off, the PC will no longer boot, and you will need to format both hard drives. Last time I did this I found that I had to do a "low level" format on the drives - I think this was because RAID volume data is stored in the MBR, and you can only clear this by re-writing that part of the disc (which a normal format does not do).

AntiLochus

BarGin wrote: »

Can anyone help me with this please? I have a Dell Dimension 9200 which has two 320GB hard disks combined to make a 640GB partition.

Is it possible to split this into, say, 80GB for the operating system and software with the balance in a separate partition for data?

If so, what is the easiest (cheapest!) way of doing it?

If you can find it, Partition Magic will allow you to re-partition your drive without having to re-install everything.

However, PM was dropped by Symantec in 2009 but there are still downloadable copies floating around.

More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartitionMagic

John_Gray

BarGin wrote: »

Can anyone help me with this please? I have a Dell Dimension 9200 which has two 320GB hard disks combined to make a 640GB partition.

Interesting! I have a Dell Dimension 9300 which originally had 2 x 120 GB disks as RAID-1, using a Promise RAID card. When one of the disks failed, they were both replaced with 400 GB drives by Dell under warranty!

But it was still RAID-1.

I've used Easeus Partition Master (free if you can find it) to repartition the drives to be 80 GB / 320 GB.

But I have no idea whether you could do that with RAID-0, and as fwor says above, RAID-0 should really be avoided like the plague...

esuhl

One of my friends used a "fakeraid" implementation and was happy enough till the motherboard suddenly developed a fault. He discovered that the hard drives could only be read if they were connected to a motherboard with an identical RAID-controller... all of which were obsolete and no longer sold...

I also had problems getting a "fakeraid" array to be read by Linux OSes, although I think it might be possible now.

Anyway, if I remember rightly you can partition a RAID array as if it were a single drive.

BarGin

Does this image indicate that it is fakeraid?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9346918/Photo%20May%2010%2C%208%2015%2032%20AM.jpg

Linbox

AntiLochus wrote: »

If you can find it, Partition Magic will allow you to re-partition your drive without having to re-install everything.

However, PM was dropped by Symantec in 2009 but there are still downloadable copies floating around.

More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartitionMagic

As you may not know how to use this prog may I suggest partedmagic or Gparted or something similar or take a look at hiren one of these will help, I'm sure.

fwor

BarGin wrote: »

Does this image indicate that it is fakeraid?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9346918/Photo%20May%2010%2C%208%2015%2032%20AM.jpg

It's a bit difficult to tell, but the general rule is that consumer-grade PCs with onboard (i.e. chipset on the motherboard) RAID controllers are almost always fakeRAID.

Full hardware RAID will almost always require a separate controller card unless it's a server-grade machine. And note that even if you have a separate card, it may still be software RAID (proper RAID controller cards are the expensive ones...).