Well, there isn't a real good place to post this, so i'll post it here. I demand a lot from my hard drives, and i may be going a little overboard with my upcoming project, but here goes. Being a gamer i prefer a fast system disk with reasonable capacity, but i also have a gigantihuge archive of TV shows (about 280Gb at the moment), which requires lots of storage, as well as my (+300) CD collection which i'd like to rip to 256kb MP3. Now that i found the required part for my case, its physically possible, but i need to know if this is possible with my motherboard or if i need a seperate controller. I've never had a drive fail me that i didn't personally fry, but i've heard enough horror stories that i'd prefer my system disk to be mirrored, the shows i'm less woried about, as they're mostly on CD-Rs at the moment since i only have a 160GB storage drive (which will be going in my xbox once i'm finished with all of this). Basically what i want to do is have 2 74Gb Raptors in a RAID 1 configuration as my system disk, and 2 250gb WD SATA drives in RAID 0 as my storage drive(s). Link to my motherboard, the DFI "NFII ULTRA INFINITY". So that would appear to the OS as (C Local Disk - Total size: 72.2 GB and (D Media Storage - Total size: 488.2 GB. I'm buying the only MoBo i could find with 4 SATA ports, and it says it supports RAID 1 and RAID 0, but my question is pretty much, can it do both at once? And before anyone points it out, my PSU should be able to handle it.

I honestly have no idea. I'm guessing no since it doesn't support RAID 0+1 (indicating it can RAID 4 drives, most of the time), but, I really don't know. I'll do a bit of reading and find out if it can.

And if it can, that's a good deal with not having to buy an SATA RAID controller, which would be your next choice if it can't handle that

Well, after more research, the onboard RAID controler should be able to do what i want, but i'm still not entirley sure. I contacted DFI, waiting for a reply that i hope isn't in too bad engrish. More good news, the controler chipset not only supports RAID 0 and 1, but also 0+1. 2 Raptors in RAID 0+1, mmm, fast.

Think it does 5 and JBOD, too... I gots one too...

yes you can do both raid1 and 0 at the same time

along there r 4 sata ports on the mobo

I might be confused here... but how can you have 2 drives in 0+1???

From what I remember of my Database class in university, 0 is striped raid and 1 is redundant (ie: backup).

It doesn't make any sense in that case that you could have 2 drives doing both 0 and 1.

Please correct me if i'm wrong.

You can't, but the original question was can he run RAID 0 and RAID 1 on that board at the same time. The answer is yes.

I dont know how to explain this too well, but here goes... Think of 2 drives, A and B, partitioned in half, so you have partitions A1, A2, B1 and B2. A1 and B1 are striped, and A2 and B2 are also striped. Its not just simple striping, its cross mirrored, so A1 and B2 are the same data, as are A2 and B1. I dont know if i explained it well, but basically you get the performance of RAID 0 and the security of RAID 1 with the only penalty being RAID 1's 50% capacity hit.

Ok, RAID 0+1 does exist, but i think i confused my explanation with RAID 1.5, which is something else i think. Heres a link to a fun animation explaining it.

Okay, if you take 2 harddrives and split them into 2 partitions each (to get 4 drives virtually) and the apply RAID 0+1, it's completely redundant (no pun intended).

Now for every read or write, you need to read/write to 2 places on the drive. So you basically just have a RAID1 array but over-complicated, and harder to recover if something goes wrong. Like I said, RAID0+1 on 2 drives makes no sense.

I'm pretty sure I was confusing it with RAID 1.5. Which, despite the problems you pointed out, does have a slight performance increase over RAID 1. I guess i have no idea what RAID 0+1 is, how is it different from RAID 10? I think i have a handle on exactly what RAID 0 and RAID 1 are, but past that i'm a bit confused...

I havn't heard of RAID1.5, however i don't exactly research this stuff.

The most likely optimazation (and obvious) that I could think of would be that your harddrive will do the partitioning you mentioned, and then act as RAID 0, and then do redundant writes during idle hdd time. So you write a file, it goes to RAID0, then during the few seconds between the next write it writes that to the 2nd partiion.... I'm not sure though and don't feel like googling to for something I don't want to take on myself

Download that animation i linked to in an earlier post, it explains RAID 1.5 all purdy like.

Doh, Flash... I'm on my spare pc right now, in the midst of a mod, and I try and keep this thing as clean as possible except for the basic necessities of software. I'll look into RAID 1.5 when I get a chance since i'm somewhat intrigued now. I don't think I'd run something liek this myself, I hate forking over $$ for a drive that in reality never ends up being used... I know there is always a chance of corruption, but i'd rather take that chance than lose 1/2 my disk space.

Quote: Originally Posted by Kr!msoN I know there is always a chance of corruption, but i'd rather take that chance than lose 1/2 my disk space.

Yeah, i've never had a drive fail on me, except for one that i fried, but all these horror stories on slashdot have convinced me that backups are a good thing. Although i'll be mirroring my system drive, i'll be risking my storage drive. RAID 0, no redundancy, twice as many points of failure. Not that anything on there will be important, but it'd be a pain in the ass to rip all my cds and copy all my shows back over a second time.

Funny, I'd think the oppsoite way. Screw your "system" drive. I reformat every few months as it is, who needs a back up of that? It's all my downloads and game files and whatnot that I wouldn't want to have to figure out how to re-aquire.

How i see it, all my media is already backed up. I have the CDs and DVDs in full quality, so i can always re-rip, all my tv shows are on cd-rs, and my friends mirror everything for me when i have LAN parties, since i'm the only one with roadrunner. Losing my system disk would suck, all the little programs i use only every few months, all my configurations, all the other little piddly crap that would take me weeks to get back to just how i like it after a reformat is what i dont want.