Hardware Raid Mirror - Drive Size vs Partition Size

[Tagman]

Think I already know the answer - just want to confirm...

I want to mirror 2 SATA drives on my Asus K8N motherboard

Normally, the drives should be of the same size (to prevent non-utilization / waste) of the "excess capacity" of the larger drive...

Wondering - does hardware raid mesh by raw drive or by partition?

If I have a 200g and 300g drive - was wondering if I could partition the larger drive to 200g and 100g partition.

I would then raid the 200g drive with the 200g partition and then access the remaining 100g partition as stand storage.

My understanding is that the drives are accessed in-total, and partitions are ignored. Thus, I would have a mirror raid of 200g and nothing else...

 

[Og]

A hardware RAID Array is established at the hardware BIOS level.
Partitioning and Formatting take at the Operating System level (e.g. Windows
XP OS utilities partition and format).

A 200g drive and 300g drive = a single 200Gig RAID Array.

AFTER you establish the RAID Array at the BIOS level, you move up to the OS
level to partition and format the Array. Since the OS sees what is reported
by the hardware BIOS -- a single 200Gig bare drive -- 200Gig is what you
will have to work with.

steve


Think I already know the answer - just want to confirm...

I want to mirror 2 SATA drives on my Asus K8N motherboard

Normally, the drives should be of the same size (to prevent non-utilization
/ waste) of the "excess capacity" of the larger drive...

Wondering - does hardware raid mesh by raw drive or by partition?

If I have a 200g and 300g drive - was wondering if I could partition the
larger drive to 200g and 100g partition.

I would then raid the 200g drive with the 200g partition and then access the
remaining 100g partition as stand storage.

My understanding is that the drives are accessed in-total, and partitions
are ignored. Thus, I would have a mirror raid of 200g and nothing else...

 

[Guest]

Youre not really mirroring the drives if they are two diffrent drives....Good
luck with it.

 

[Leythos]

Think I already know the answer - just want to confirm...

I want to mirror 2 SATA drives on my Asus K8N motherboard

Normally, the drives should be of the same size (to prevent non-utilization / waste) of the "excess capacity" of the larger drive...

Wondering - does hardware raid mesh by raw drive or by partition?

If I have a 200g and 300g drive - was wondering if I could partition the larger drive to 200g and 100g partition.

I would then raid the 200g drive with the 200g partition and then access the remaining 100g partition as stand storage.

My understanding is that the drives are accessed in-total, and partitions are ignored. Thus, I would have a mirror raid of 200g and nothing else...

In response to this and the other person that said you're not really
mirroring with difference sizes, YES, Mirroring works with different
sizes of drives and it's at the BIOS/Hardware level.

If you have two drives, only the specific part you MIRROR will be
redundant and benefit from the RAID-1 setup:

Disk 0 200GB Single partition
Disk 1 300GB unpartitioned/unused

In the hardware setup you can Mirror Disk 0 to 1 but you can not mirror
disk 1 to 0 using only 200GB.

Also, your remaining 100GB on disk 1 will not be redundant.

 

[Bob I]

Andrew E. please go read some information about hardware RAID
configurations, as you seem to be rather confused as to what they
consist of and how they may be set up.