RAID Help

D

donkeyass

Geek Trainee
I recently purchased a RAID card that supports level 0,1, and +1 -1 and I have a 40 GB drive and a 300 GB drive that I am trying to make a level 0 RAID out of (striping mode) until i can use my 250 GB with my 300 GB. I set it up fine on the RAID card and Windows sees the RAID, but it only sees it as like a 74 GB RAID. Why? Do all of the drives that make up the RAID have to be the same size and if so can I make it so that I can make a RAID with different sized drives that use all of their disk space? Please help, thank you.
 
In a striping RAID, the RAID will only be as large as 2x the smallest drive. Since your smallest drive has about 37GB of usable storage, you are limited to the first 37GB of storage on the larger drive as well. That gives you a total of 74GB across both discs.
 
I'm not sure if this will work, but you may be able to use JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) if it's available on that card.
 
Yeah, JBOD will make multiple discs of any size appear like one large volume, like a RAID-0. Unlike a RAID-0 though, you gain no added performance from such a setup. The only usefulness of a JBOD that I can think of is that you can get around the 24-drive limitation of Windows using that method.
 
ahhhhhh. i see. well ain't that a bitch. ok then does anyone know where i can find a RAID card that supports JBOD? I lokked on a couple of websites and found nothing, just one, but it was like $250, the on i got was $30. Thanks.
 
My whole point with the last post is that JBOD is pointless. You'd be better off just using your "RAID Controller" (hint: it's not a real hardware RAID controller) as a regular IDE controller ...which is what it fundamentally is anyway. :)
 
Basically, outside of purchasing another drive exactly like the one you want to run in RAID 0, you're not going to be able to obtain both of the results you want.
 
so JBOD is like an ATA controller in the sense that it just shows all of the drives that are connected as they are and does not "put them together". is there any way to "put together" multiple hard drives that are different sizes? eg: buy some sort of card that will be able to make my computer see my 300GB and 250 GB drives as 550 GB. can this be done w/o windows' dynamic disks or any other software?
 
You'd need a real hardware RAID controller to do that, or else a switch of operating systems. Besides, a JBOD is a pretty worthless arangement, and not worth spending money on. I can't think of a single scenario where a JBOD would be better than a RAID-0, and your existing fakie RAID controller can at least do that in software.
 
so i basicly got a shitty RAID card and can get what i want if i get a good RAID card that supports a lvl 0 RAID, right?
 
donkeyass said:
so i basicly got a shitty RAID card and can get what i want if i get a good RAID card that supports a lvl 0 RAID, right?
Click to expand...
Your RAID card is not a real RAID controller, it's an IDE controller. The RAID part happens in the driver, not in the RAID card itself. This isn't as good as a real RAID controller, but those don't come cheap. In any case, you will not be able to get the full capacity out of the drives unless you go with either seperate drives (normal IDE function), or a JBOD (which is pointless). A RAID-0 would double the speed of your multidisc array, but is limited to 2x the size of the smallest drive, so you'd lose about 50gb on one drive using the drive in Windows while doubling your performance. What is the purpose of this RAID array? Speed? Redundancy? What?
 
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