Raid 0 multiple partitions on one drive

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Is there any software that will allow one to raid 0 multiple partitions together on one drive?
 
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Wow, did I ask if it was useless? Did I ask for your opinion if it served no purpose? It serves a purpose for me. Maybe you need to review the Terms of Service agreement about how to treat people.

 
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OK...
Then let me ask gently...Why are you wanting to do this?
 
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I stated a simple question. I do not need to tell you what I hope to gain or why I want to do it. I came to this forum because there are people more knowledgeable than me to ask a simple question hoping I would get an answer, not inquiries into why or rude comments stating that it is useless and serves no purpose. Is there a software or method to Raid 0 multiple partitions on one drive? Simple question.
 
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If you think you are going to gain speed from this, you are not. And you sure will defeat the RAID purpose in the first place as stated. You might be able to fool it into working Windows' built in disk management but nobody has tried it to my knowledge because, yep, it's useless for users. The "ID" in RAID stands for independent disks for a reason.
 
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And if you are not happy with the answers here, perhaps you can read one from a similar question that was answered by a Western Digital representative here on Tom's who is a forum member. I quote:

When you want to configure a RAID storage setup, you need at least TWO identical hard drives. Moreover, you always need to have a specific purpose for such a configuration.
Click to expand...

There's a reason you were asked for what purpose. That's what people do here to help assist and guide you. If that bothers you then nobody help you anymore.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3269820/raid-partitions.html
 
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No sir, you do not need to know the purpose in order to answer the question. Secondly, on another forum, I read that it was possible to stripe several partitions on one drive using a command called "mdadm" but I am unable to do that with my computer and if I had access to a computer that had that particular command, the thread was closed before anyone elaborated on how exactly to do it. Thirdly, the first response I got on this forum was rude and insulting and no one has yet to actually answer the question. Is there a software or method that can stripe or RAID 0 several partitions on one drive. You can simply say, Not to my knowledge, let me check with someone else...something nice and simple along those lines. That is, if you are truly on this forum to help.
 
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@hpotter12876 I'd advise you to check the attitude at the door or your stay here may be a short one. Now, the question WAS answered, you cannot RAID partitions, only physical drives. If this answer is not to your liking then there's nothing more anyone can do for you.
 
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USAFRet -------> Please do not ask me anymore questions. If you are unable to answer the question posted as to whether it can be done and how....then please don't respond anymore. Thank you.
 
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Well I did look out of curiosity and found nothing. I did find some older info from Windows XP and NT but who knows if it works on Windows 10 (if you are even running that since you don't say that either). I also found some who tried it on a utility that came with their motherboard software bundle programs. That's why I said "to my knowledge." But I won't bother asking any more questions and am disconnecting from the thread. Good luck.
 
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Well, thank you 10tacle at least for looking into it. You said you found nothing but also found some older info from Windows XP and NT. Does anyone know anything about the "mdadm" command to do it? I can't find anything. Also, to whoever said it is my attitude that needs checking needs to check theirs. I'm not the one insulting people. Also, one person's answer of quoting another saying that you need two drives, does not mean it is not possible.
 
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Thank you for looking into it..USAFRet....on one thread it says its possible but no one says how. The other thread says not to do it (meaning its possible) because it would decrease performance of which I had already read in my previous research and was told here as well. Well, if anyone comes along with a solution to do it....let me know.

 
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The reason we ask "why" is because a lot of the time people are asking the wrong question without realizing. Like someone will come in here asking "what temperature would a graphics card fan shroud melt at". We could just tell them the melting point of plastic, but instead we ask why and it turns out the person was trying to reflow their card in a toaster oven or something because it wasn't working.

By asking why, we can determine what the person is ultimately trying to achieve, and most likely provide better advice. In the above example, we could provide a number of other troubleshooting steps that should be tried before attempting to reflow (as well as better approaches to performing a reflow).

 
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“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” I already know that people say that to partition a drive then raid 0 them together will decrease performance. I have come across this many, many times in my research. So, that being said, it means that someone must have done it to find out that it would decrease performance. The why is, I want to see for myself....then go from there. In the past, if you jumped off a bridge and it was high enough, you would most certainly fall to your death. However, someone came up with several ways to jump off a bridge and survive, without getting hurt. While this little experiment will not kill me, I would like to see the experiment first hand and its results. Does the answer to the "why" now help you in anyway?
 
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I did the research as well and came up with everything above and more, and I did not gather that anyone has ever gotten it functional to "prove it". Mainly because everyone who is answering these questions and is giving this opinion fundamentally understands how both hard drives and RAID 0 works.

Hard drives have platters and ONE set of heads. If you Raid 0 2 hard drives you share data between the two, performance is increased because you have twice the platters, and more importantly twice the heads. One set of heads is pulling part of the data while the other set is pulling the other part of the data at the same time, queuing up everything faster. In theory, if you were to RAID 0 two partitions on one drive, you have the same set of heads trying at the same time to serve up data that is now separated into two non continuous locations. So the head needs to seek back and forth to piece the data together. Whereas without RAID, the data should be all continuously together (unless the drive is massively fragmented, thats what defragmenting is for.)

Hopefully this answers your question, its simple physics.

EDIT: realized I forgot to address "mdadm". That is a Linux tool (meaning you would need to be running Linux as your OS), and while I've never used it personally I did check out its specs and I don't see anything to indicate it would allow you to do this. Every RAID tool hardware or software look for hardware IDs to coordinate RAID, not partitions.
 
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The only way that I can conceive that it could be done is to use virtual drives on a virtual machine and then RAID 0 them, which would give you substantially worse performance than from any single virtual drive do to all the additional head movement needed for reads/writes.

And as a bonus you would get far less data integrity, if either partition failed all data would be gone, which is why RAID 0 is rarely recommended with two or more physical drives.
 
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Thanks. So a possible solution is to set up a virtual drive which still uses the hard drive, but the computer will recognize it as an independent drive and will allow you to raid them together. Does anyone know how to do this? Why would it write the same info to each partition? Raid 0 is not mirroring.

 
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Sorry was thinking of raid 1 for some reason, but you will increase head activity since it has to write little parts to each partition.

Its not a virtual drive, you have to make a virtual machine on the host computer. Then partition a drive and give them to the virtual machine to then raid together, since the VM will see each partition as a separate drive.
 
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And then everything runs WAY slower because you still have only one set of heads trying to do twice the work.

Intel's Matrix RAID is the only one I've heard of that can do anything like this. (I'm sure there are others. I'm not up on RAID controllers.) But even Intel says to use partitions on different drives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Matrix_RAID

Like all RAID, Intel Matrix RAID employs two or more physical hard disks which the operating system will treat as a single disk, in order to increase redundancy which avoids data loss (as all RAID levels except RAID 0 do), and/or to increase the speed at which data is written to and/or read from a disk.

Intel Matrix RAID is not a new RAID level. It allows different areas (e.g. partitions or logical volumes)
Click to expand...

Basically, most motherboard RAID controllers need you to use the entire disk in the array, or at least they used to. Matrix/RST allowed you to setup partitions to do this, but you still need different disks as the bolded section says. I don't mean to pick on you but the previous answers were correct. Even if you set this up, you are going to incur overhead on the disk, and performance WILL be worse than just a single disk. Your read/write heads will be moving all over the disk instead of reading and writing and the performance will be HORRIBLE. If this is just a thought experiment the answer is yes, if you have a controller that can handle RAIDing partitions. I would NEVER actually set this up.

AID0 is a joke anyways. Was used eons ago but not needed anymore. We have SSDs now and use those for speed. If you want speed, use an SSD. If you want a duplicate copy of something, use an external drive. There simply isn't a use for RAID at the home.
 
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So, I created a 15 GB disk image and speed tested it on my hard drive. I got write speeds avg. 60 MB/s and read speeds avg. 60 MB/s. So then I took the image and placed it on a thumb drive. It read at the same speeds as the thumb drive which were 60 MB/s and 165 MB/s. So then I raided two 32 GB thumb drives and the writes went down from 60 to 40 but the reads went up to 310. So, then I copied the disk image from the 2 raided drives and copied it to a 64 bit drive. I opened the disk image from the thumb drive and speed tested it. It ran at the same speed as the 64 thumb drive. I also learned that you can RAID 0 disk images together to get one raided disk image. You can then copy that disk image to whatever drive you wish. You can also raid those raided images together. So, it would be interesting to see a couple of raided disk images on one drive raided to another set on another drive. Raiding the disk images is possible using the mdadm command in linux which i found out the the mdadm command can be used on a Unix system as well but I don't know if there are variations as to what it does on Unix vs. Linux. There is another program that raids together raid sets but it looked like a Windows program from the looks of it.

The infö can be found here------->https://askubuntu.com/questions/663027/create-raid-array-of-image-files
The info can be found here------->https://medium.com/dfclub/how-to-combine-raid-array-images-in-encase-836856cfd893

Also, I watched a youtube video about creating a ram disk. I wonder if it would be possible to create two ram disks and raid them together using the mdadm command.
 
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