Raid 10 on two HD's

[Daniel159753]

I'm building a new system and I want to have a Raid 10 configuration on it.
The problem is, I only have two HD's.
So I thought I could partition them each in two partitions so I would have four drives.

So,
My questions are:
Is this possible and if it is, how to do it?
Of course you have to make sure to have it like this:

( 1 is the first half of the data and 2 the second half)
HD1 / HD2
/ 1 / 2 /
/ 2 / 1 /

and not:
(when one drive cashes your will louse all your data.)
HD1 / HD 2
/ 1 / 2 /
/ 1 / 2 /

I hope this is clear enough.

 

[ronintexas]

RAID is best used by hardware RAID, and with hardware RAID, you are taking a whole drive and initializing it in the RAID - it doesn't look at partitions. You need a minimum of 4 drives for RAID 10.

That being said, RAID 1 is the same as RAID 10 in your situation. RAID 0 is striping (taking two drives and making one volume), RAID 1 is mirroring (two drives, making a single volume with half the space - both drives are mirrored), and RAID 10 (or RAID 1 + 0) combines RAID 0 and RAID 1, making mirrored and striped drives.

RAID 0 doesn't require same size drives. RAID 1 and RAID 10 do require identical drives.

 

[Traciatim]

I'm building a new system and I want to have a Raid 10 configuration on it.
The problem is, I only have two HD's.
So I thought I could partition them each in two partitions so I would have four drives.

So,
My questions are:
Is this possible and if it is, how to do it?
Of course you have to make sure to have it like this:

( 1 is the first half of the data and 2 the second half)
HD1 / HD2
/ 1 / 2 /
/ 2 / 1 /

and not:
(when one drive cashes your will louse all your data.)
HD1 / HD 2
/ 1 / 2 /
/ 1 / 2 /

I hope this is clear enough.

I'm not even sure you can physically do that, and even if you did your performance would by abysmally terrible (due to full seeks every time you write data).

If you want to protect all of your data against 1 drive failure with 2 drives you do RAID1. If you want to protect just some data, but also have more storage space, you just copy the important data on to both drives. If your want performance and don't care about the data you do a RAID0.

Personally, I buy all of my machines with 2 drives and use Allway Sync just to sync my documents and family pictures to ensure the data is on both drives, and then also on a second machine in the house. I haven't lost data in over a decade. It's still not protected against fire, or theft . . . so you still need backups any way you decide to do it.

 

[Hawkeye22]

It can be done depending on your motherboard, but I wouldn't recommend it. performance would be bad.

Intel Matrix RAID is not a new RAID level. One of the features that Intel Matrix RAID has, which many other RAID implementations lack, is that different areas (e.g. partitions or logical volumes) on the same disk can be assigned to different RAID devices. The ICH10R supports Standard RAID levels RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, and RAID 5.[1]

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