dual boot with shared RAID storage - good idea? problems?

[giantbucket]

so, has anyone done this...? dual boot machine (on a normal single SSD), but for the bulk storage drive (like the D: drive) have it on a RAID array (made using BIOS utility) and have that RAIDed drive be accessible by BOTH booting OSes? i know that i can share a plain single non-RAID storage drive between a Win7 booted OS and a Win8.1 booted OS, but does adding the RAID layer (for the STORAGE DRIVE ONLY) change the situation?

i am assuming it'll be fine, but i've been wrong before.... once...

 

[01111111]

Nah, should be fine with the correct drivers installed.

 

[giantbucket]

good to know. i hoped for pretty well the same thing - that it would be "taken care of" by the drivers anyways.

now the question - do i do a 4x2TB RAID0, or just add independent drives? this is more of a workstation / gaming machine, and i'm too cheap to buy SSDs and also kinda want to dabble in RAID. i only have 4 ports available for RAIDing though.

 

[01111111]

Well Raid 0's are fast but a little risky. You could go with a Raid 10 if your board supports it. You get some redundancy plus speed.

JBOD is kinda boring.

Just be aware that you can not boot to a volume larger than 2tb unless using UEFI + GPT.

 

[giantbucket]

boot is on a separate single 240G SSD, so no worries there.

i tried JBOD once and lost 1.25TB of movies, music, photos, etc. so yeah, NOT touching JBOD ever again. hmm... RAID 10 is fast but wastes a lot of HDD capacity - though how relevant that'll be in real world use i don't know yet. i've got a lead on some well-priced 2TB drives, so i would do a 4x2TB in either RAID0, RAID5, or RAID10 (that's what my mobo supports).

i know and understand the theory of RAID, but never actually USED it in real life...

i know my games library takes up 740G so far. it'll probably grow to 1TB within a year - especially over the winter.

 

[01111111]

Raid 10 is best for higher IOPS anyway and you will lose capacity of 2 of the 4 drives. Raid 5 is probably best for storage, I used a raid 5 for storage for years.