RAID questions

[beast217]

I an considering an Abit kt7a/kt7 raid motherboard and have been trying to understand RAID. I understand the difference between RAID 0,1,and 0+1. My questions are as follows.

1. On a RAID system using two matched drives say 10gig each as RAID 0...can this be partitioned into multiple drives such as C,D,E,F each 5gig with partition magic and maintain the striping performance benefits or must it remain as a single RAID drive C 20 gig?

2. How do disk utilities such as scan disk or Norton defrag and ghost work with a RAID setup as described above? I currently use a ghost boot disk to back-up all files on my IDE c (windows)drive now.

3. Is the RAID drive available if you do a minimal boot from floppy. I'm assuming it would be since the controller is hardware and bios controlable.

I currently have my one of my 20 gig drives partioned as C: windows files, D: program files, E: data (which is my documents and any non software reloadable files), and F: TEMP (for temp internet and windows files). I back up the first three using ghost to another drive in case I do something stupid to allow me to reload windows or files without having to reload all the programs. I could not do this if the RAID drive must remain as one big drive unless I Install 4 drives and use RAID 0+1 to get both striping performance on RAID C: and backup security on RAID D:. Sorry so long and thanks for any assistance you can give.

[Stan]

Hi,

1. Yes... The RAID controller fools the OS and presents the stripe - RAID0 (in your example, 2x10GB) as one big 20GB partition. Once the array is created, you partition it the same way you would partition a single disk (using fdisk).

2. Once again, Norton, Diskeeper, ... any defrag utility are not aware of the presence of a RAID controller. They will defrag the c: drive or the d: drive without knowing that they are "sitting" in an array.

3. yes, if you boot from a DOS or Win98 boot disk, the RAID is available for you to partition/format it.

Here is a good link that will explain you the different RAID levels.

Stan

[MTAtech]

Stan is right.

My 2 cents is that RAID is done at the hardware level. thus the OS and applications don't see the 2 drives. Thus, if you have 2 identical 10GB drives being RAID mirrored, they appear as 1 10GB drive. If you stripe RAID those drives, they will appear as 1 20GB drive.