Can I partition drives in RAID 5?

[Alted4]

I am planning on setting up a media server with a few old drives that I have laying around, plus a few higher capacity drives to add capacity.

The smallest drive I have is 500GB, and I would like to buy one or two 4TB drives. Would I be able to partition the 4TB drives into 500GB segments so I don't lose all of the extra space? If so, what would the best method be to do so?

Thanks for the help.

 

[glugglug]

Pretty sure you can. But the resulting performance of the drive head seeking between the partitions is going to be worse than running off a CD.

Also, if either of the 4TB drives dies, you lost more than 1 partition of your RAID5 set, so you are screwed, and may as well just have been using RAID0.

Really far better off using various software drive pooling apps like DrivePool, FlexRAID, SnapRAID, even Storage Spaces.

 

[Alted4]

Discouraging, but informative. Would I be able to go in the opposite direction, and combine multiple drives to be seen as one?

 

[glugglug]

Discouraging, but informative. Would I be able to go in the opposite direction, and combine multiple drives to be seen as one?

That's kind of the point of both RAID and the software drive pooling apps...

 

[smakme7757]

Depends on the type of RAID you are going to use.

If you are using the motherboard RAID or a RAID card then you will be using the entire disk. S

If you use something like Windows storage spaces then you get more flexibility depending on how you pool the drives. Storage spaces allows you to create virtual disks on your hardware. You could put all your drives in one pool, but you would still be limited by the size of the smaller drives.

For example, if you have 2x4TB and 3x500GB with storage spaces you could in theory do the following

1x RAID 1 volume with 3.5TB storage space using up 3.5TB on each 4TB drive - Leaving 500Gb(250GB per drive) to play with

That leaves you with 3x 500GB disks and 500GB free space on the other disks. You could then create a 4 disk array RAID 10 or RAID 5 with the left over space. Not taking into account the space lost from formatting and so on. My math might be of, but i'm pretty sure the theory is sound 🙂.

Both arrays would suffer a performance hit because you are running two arrays where 2 disks are shared between the two separate arrays

 

[glugglug]

Your best bet particularly for drives of variable sizes, is a 3rd party pooling app, like Stablebit DrivePool or FlexRAID. Or SnapRAID if you want to stick to something free.

 

[aigomorla]

I am planning on setting up a media server with a few old drives that I have laying around, plus a few higher capacity drives to add capacity.

The smallest drive I have is 500GB, and I would like to buy one or two 4TB drives. Would I be able to partition the 4TB drives into 500GB segments so I don't lose all of the extra space? If so, what would the best method be to do so?

Thanks for the help.

its counter productive, and it would probably be slow as hell seeing how 8 virtual disks would be 1 physical disk.

Also i cant think of any RAID software which would allow u to do something like that.

Your best off JBODing... (just bunch of drives) into 1 large array, and then partitioning that.

Depends on the type of RAID you are going to use.

No it will NOT... look at his physicals... not virtuals.
1 x 4TB drive will be partitioned into 8 x 500GB sections.... that means 1 physical drive is taking up 8 virtual drives... typically RAID is the other way arround...
You have multipul physical drives, adding to 1 virtual drive.....

 

[smakme7757]

its counter productive, and it would probably be slow as hell seeing how 8 virtual disks would be 1 physical disk.

Also i cant think of any RAID software which would allow u to do something like that.

Your best off JBODing... (just bunch of drives) into 1 large array, and then partitioning that.



No it will NOT... look at his physicals... not virtuals.
1 x 4TB drive will be partitioned into 8 x 500GB sections.... that means 1 physical drive is taking up 8 virtual drives... typically RAID is the other way arround...
You have multipul physical drives, adding to 1 virtual drive.....

read my entire post.

i was referring to the type of raid software/hardware not the raid level. Maybe i should have been more clear, but seeing as I described exactly what you wrote makes me think you didn't get past the first full stop.

There are heaps of tools on the market for virtual raid volumes. Windows storage spaces being one of them.

 

[aigomorla]

read my entire post.

There are heaps of tools on the market for virtual raid volumes. Windows storage spaces being one of them.

please show me a software that doesnt look at disks but virtual partitions on a single drive and then RAID's them...
^ u see thats the part where raid fails... u cant setup raid on partitions on 1 single drive, as it makes no sense on why u did raid to begin with.

This is not virtual drive setup by a dedicated controller which is later RAID'd by the same controller.

This is a single physical drive in which he wishes to install partitions to act as virtual drives to work in a raid layout....
So if you know of a software which allows you to do that, id like to know...

the only option the OP has is forget RAID and just JBOD.
He can JBOD his entire disks all into 1 large array regardless of size, and not lose the storage space, or suffer from i/o bandwith on 1 drive having to act as several.

 

[smakme7757]

please show me a software that doesnt look at disks but virtual partitions on a single drive and then RAID's them...
^ u see thats the part where raid fails... u cant setup raid on partitions on 1 single drive, as it makes no sense on why u did raid to begin with.

This is not virtual drive setup by a dedicated controller which is later RAID'd by the same controller.

This is a single physical drive in which he wishes to install partitions to act as virtual drives to work in a raid layout....
So if you know of a software which allows you to do that, id like to know...

the only option the OP has is forget RAID and just JBOD.
He can JBOD his entire disks all into 1 large array regardless of size, and not lose the storage space, or suffer from i/o bandwith on 1 drive having to act as several.

All my assumptions have been that he has 2 or more drives as he stated getting 2x4TB on the OP. Which I did write in my initial post. Actually my initial post assumed 2x4TB and 3x500GB as an example. Just try and give an overview of how virtual disks pools work and why it might be useful im this scenario.

I still don't know why your harping on about a single drive.at least I have not been referring to single drives

 

[glugglug]

please show me a software that doesnt look at disks but virtual partitions on a single drive and then RAID's them...
^ u see thats the part where raid fails... u cant setup raid on partitions on 1 single drive, as it makes no sense on why u did raid to begin with

The software RAID built into Windows since NT4 will let you do this. Doesn't make sense to do so but you can. Pretty sure you can also do this with DrivePool, FlexRAID, and others as well, but again, it doesn't make sense to do things that way.

 

[code65536]

It's an unusual setup, but under the right circumstances, it could still make sense:

1) Create a Storage Spaces pool with 2x4TB, 1x500GB drives.

2) Create a 3x500GB parity volume (probably best with fixed allocation). This will consume the 500GB drive and 500GB of each of the 4TB drives.

3) Now you essentially has 2x3.5TB that can used as a spanned/JBOD (or mirrored) volume.

End result: just two volumes, one 1TB volume with parity resilience, and another 7TB volume (if not mirroring). If you have lots of expendable data (e.g., if you ripped your Blu-Ray collection to HDD for convenience--at 25-50GB apiece, you need lots of space, and if the drive dies, you still have the original discs) and a relatively smaller amount of important data, this setup would actually make sense.