Hardware RAID that can have both raid0 and raid1 partitions

[ayqazi]

Hi,

Just wondering: do any hardware RAID cards exist that allow some partitions to be raid0 and some to be RAID1?

I want my games to run off RAID0, and I want to dual-boot into Linux to do my development and other work in RAID1.

Windoze, as usual, does things to stupid way, by only allowing software raid to be used if a completely new partitioning scheme is used. Linux has no such restriction.

The solution I've come across is to "Dynamic disk" both drives, use Windoze to create the partitions (including its own RAID0 partition), then Linux can be configured to use some of them as its RAID1 partitions (good old Linux). Hopefully this will do the job in Linux, and the RAID 1 will preserve my data if a hard drive crashes (I'm not too bothered about losing a few saves games in Windoze, that's all I use it for).

But if hardware RAID can allow RAID 0 and RAID 1 to coexist on the same disk, it'll save me a lot of headache. It probably can't (not on inexpensive SATA controllers anyway), but still.... any ideas?

Thanks

 

[blue68f100]

Look at the Raidcore 4852 SATA raid controler. It offers a lot of options. Toms has done a review on this card.

 

[ayqazi]

Um... that's a software based solution I'm afraid. I need hardware, to keep it windows/linux cross-platform.

There obviously isn't a hardware solution to this problem, so I'll just stick with the current solution I've come up with, i.e. let Windoze create the partitions in Dynamic Disks, and Linux can use them (with a bit of effort on my part).

Thanks for the heads-up about that review, it was interesting.

 

[maury73]

Be careful and do VERY frequent backups! I run for a while a RAID0 Dynamic Disk under WXP... in 4 months I had to use at least 10 times the "CHKDSK /R/P" command from the Recovery Console and times I had to restore from backups CD.
Microsoft admitted a bug in his Dynamic Disks management, I don't know if it was correted in SP2, so if you opt for this solution, keep your backups in synch as often as possible.