Basic or Dynamic Disks?

[Nothinman]

But the OP was also talking about using Dynamic Disks which are the base for MS' software RAID, the underlying controller's abilities are irrelevant at that point.

 

[Brazen]

Or you could just point him to one of the many benchmarks showing Linux Raid outperforming any of those software raid cards, since this has already been done to death.

 

[sao123]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
But the OP was also talking about using Dynamic Disks which are the base for MS' software RAID, the underlying controller's abilities are irrelevant at that point.

I'm not looking to use dynamic disk for any software raid, spanning or any other capabilities...

all I want to be able to do is resize my XP partitions on the fly without having to use PM and reboot and wait 6 hours.

 

[Nothinman]

all I want to be able to do is resize my XP partitions on the fly without having to use PM and reboot and wait 6 hours.

Well the speed to resize will most likely be about the same and I believe you need to use Vista if you want to shrink NTFS filesystems. But IMO the tradeoff isn't worth it, if something screws up you'll have a much more difficult time getting access to those Dynamic Disks than you will a disk with just a normal partition table.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: sao123
all I want to be able to do is resize my XP partitions on the fly without having to use PM and reboot and wait 6 hours.

Please don't take this as criticism....but are you sure you really need four partitions on your RAID 1 data drive?

Normally, the first thing you'd do with partitions is separate your OS and your data. That makes it possible to re-install or repair the OS without restoring your data, and keeps users from accidentally overflowing the drive and crashing the operating system. But you've already separated the OS with a separate RAID 0 partition.

While partitioning a data drive can, theoretically, speed up certain types of data access and can have some other theoretical benefits, I'd ask whether it's worth the effort that it takes frequenty resize partitions.

i find myself at different times having to adjust the size of the partitions on my Raid 1... depending on the amount and type of files I am saving at a particular time.
[Which with partition magic is a long process (and sometimes scary of losing data)...]

You DO back up your RAID 1 partitions, right?

 

[sao123]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: sao123
all I want to be able to do is resize my XP partitions on the fly without having to use PM and reboot and wait 6 hours.

Please don't take this as criticism....but are you sure you really need four partitions on your RAID 1 data drive?

Normally, the first thing you'd do with partitions is separate your OS and your data. That makes it possible to re-install or repair the OS without restoring your data, and keeps users from accidentally overflowing the drive and crashing the operating system. But you've already separated the OS with a separate RAID 0 partition.

While partitioning a data drive can, theoretically, speed up certain types of data access and can have some other theoretical benefits, I'd ask whether it's worth the effort that it takes frequenty resize partitions.

i find myself at different times having to adjust the size of the partitions on my Raid 1... depending on the amount and type of files I am saving at a particular time.
[Which with partition magic is a long process (and sometimes scary of losing data)...]

You DO back up your RAID 1 partitions, right?

I have partitions because I have different types of data... its more of an organizational thing than a performance thing.

My H drive is for my MP3's
My P Drive is for all my install files, patches, & drivers
My Q Drive is for my CD iso's
My T drive is for my personal files & documents

i backup as much as I can to DVD's.

 

[Nothinman]

I have partitions because I have different types of data... its more of an organizational thing than a performance thing.

You have heard about directories, right?

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: sao123
I have partitions because I have different types of data... its more of an organizational thing than a performance thing.

My H drive is for my MP3's
My P Drive is for all my install files, patches, & drivers
My Q Drive is for my CD iso's
My T drive is for my personal files & documents

i backup as much as I can to DVD's.

From an organizational point of view, having four partitions on one drive is no better than having four folders in the root folder of one partition on the same drive. The folder method is much more flexible, and has none of the problems that partitions have in terms of needing to be resized and moved around if your storage space needs change over time.

 

[postmortemIA]

Yet another victim of "partitions are cool" scheme. You know that you're slowing disks a bit with each new partition, because disk head has to jump a bit more each time different partition is being accessed. All your H,P,Q, and T drives contain personal files.

Vista can resize all but perhaps boot and system partitions, so that's a way to go.

 

[Brazen]

holy crud this thread went off on a tangent. I wasn't going to suggest the op switch to linux, just because he uses raid. I was just pointing out that those controllers are not true hardware raid. If it works fine for him, than ok, he just needs to be aware of the differences.

Can't we all just get along.