Re: RAIDING different size drives

Sydney Lambe wrote:
I want to mirror 2 disks mirror using RAID.

Can this be done on a 750GB and 500GB disk?

It's a single user desktop running XP with RAID provided by a PCI card. Might change the mobo to one with RIAD if it's better?

This is for editing audio. Don't want to lose audio work if a disk fails so RAID looks right.

I believe that with a hardware RAID solution (and I think that also applies to pretend hardware RAID that is often supported by motherboards and cheap cards), you have to use whole disks in the RAID. That means the 750 GB disk will be treated as 500 GB to make the mirroring work.

If you use software raid, you can do it on a partition level - use 250GB of the 750 GB for the OS, software, swap, etc., and use a 500 GB partition for mirroring with a matching partition on the other disk.

Of course, the idea of software RAID on windows to improve reliability is an oxymoron. Use RAID on a windows machine to improve speed, but if your data is important then save it regularly on a reliable system. File system corruption, due to Windows itself or to malware running on the system, far outweighs the risk of hardware disk failures (though corruption may affect only some files, while hardware failure can affect the whole disk). And when Windows or malware mucks up your file system, your RAID 1 setup ensures that the same errors are copied over to the mirrored drive.

In short, RAID can improve speed and/or uptime, but it does not noticeably improve data security, and it is not a substitute for backups.
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