qwilliam

i was just wondering if you can raid with one physical drive? in other words, if i partition my sata drive into two, can i raid them? it sounds like it can work in my mind, but i'm not sure.

Bires

I've heard of such things, for data redundancy, but I don't know why this would be a good idea.

Generally, RAID is used for security (copying data on two drive simultaneously, in case one of them fails, you have a real-time backup) or speed (both hard drive read/write heads moving at the same time).

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DarkFury

Personally, I've never heard of RAID on a single partitioned drive.

I don't think that is possible...


Bires... even a redundant RAID uses 2 physical hard drives... not "partitions".

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attgig

even if it is possible, it defeats the purpose of raid.

1) speed.
you have data striped across multiple drives, so that seeking and transferring can go on simultaneously.
2) backup.
if your drive fails, the backup is useless because the backup is on the drive that failed.


in other words.... don't do it.

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qwilliam

i don't really care about raid 0 because a 10k drive is plenty fast enough for what i'm doing...no need to go any faster.

what i was going for was backup. however, as you pointed out, it pretty much is useless. in my mind, i only thought that the bad partition would fail but the backup partition would be fine. thanks for pointing out my flawed thinking.

DarkFury

Well if all you need is a "backup"... why not just Norton Ghost partition 1 to partition 2 every so often... that way you accomplish pretty much the same thing.

bachviet

Or use Ghost to burn to CDs or DVDs.

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Bires

I know. I've RAIDED 0,1,5,1/0 at various times. Sorry about the plural confusion.

But I have seen software that was designed to write data to two partitions on the same drive, although this is not RAID

(BTW: RAID, Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks/Drives)

ribitch

it would be slow because you are doubling the amount of disk activity to the disk., plus teh drive must scan awhole lot more, which slows things down.

On a mac, it IS possible. I have done it with 10.4. I was shocked to see that it could do it, so i did install it. It was slow. The only thing it would protect against is corruption of a partition.

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Bires