RAID question

[Hemiboy]

I have a ABIT KR7-A and was thinking about mirroring two drives. Is it possible to mirror a partition??

I have a 80gb hard drive with a 10Gb boot partition (c
I also have a 40Gb drive with a 10Gb partition. Can't I create a Mirror with the two partitions?? (Both are 7200Rpm)

From what I read up on I think It is only possible to Mirror DRIVES and not PARTITIONS. Is this true?? What a waste! (For me anyways)

[Todd a]

As far as I know you must have the same brand and even model and it will blow away any partitions to make the mirror image. Basically it is best for you to start with RAID when you are building the system and get the hard drives at the same time. I have never set up a RAID myself, but as far as I understand it this is the case.

[AMDnut]

As far as I know, you cannot only "Mirror" a partition.

As Todda stated, you need a pair of the same drives. When you create the "mirrored" array, you can then partition the drive that is mirrored as you wish. All partitions will be mirrored in the array. At least, this is the way I understand it. I run RAID 0 which is not true RAID since there is no redundancy.

Mirroring is really only for safety, to protect against data loss in the event of a hard drive failure. In that respect, it is truly useful. But for your need, it won't work.

[deltree_windows]

a RAID controller cant do that, but i imagine it could be a pretty useful feature to have. reserving a small partition of 2 drives for mirroring would be a good way to not waste an entire drive in RAID1. i suppose software RAID could do it, but it would be fairly slow and im not aware that anything actually does it.

[MitchSchaft]

No, you can't RAID a single partition. Mirroring will not destroy partitions. That's Raid+0(striping). All these little controller cards out there are mainly Software RAID. (Highpoint, Promise, the other ones, etc...) The harddrives do not HAVE TO be the same, but it will only mirror to the smallest size drive. So, if you wanted to mirror that 80GB and 40GB, you're only going to have 40GB worth of space.