How is data stored across 2 drives in RAID0?

djdube

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Jan 4, 2005
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I'm looking at building a computer with two WD Black 750GB Drives (3 platter I believe) in RAID 0. Ideally, I'd like to partition the drives so I have one OS/Application partition, and the other would contain data. I'd also like to have the OS + apps sitting on the furthest outside of the drives as possible.

I've not done RAID 0 before... I assume when creating the first partition it's split between the 2 drives. But here's my question... on a given drive, how is the data placed on the individual platters? I assume it's first block on platter 0, first block platter 1, first block platter 2, second block platter 0, etc... is that correct?

Long and short, I'm wonding if I need to be careful when creating an OS+App partition in this scenario (was thinking 120GB partition)... this would be a fresh install... Windows 7 64bit.

Thanks!

Dave
 

djdube

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Jan 4, 2005
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Right... I followed that part... asking it differently, assuming a 2 Disk, 3 platter drive (labled below as P0, P1, P2)... which one of the following is correct for 12 chuncks of data sequentially written?

Option1:

Disk 0 P0: Data0, Data6
Disk 0 P1: Data2, Data8
Disk 0 P2: Data4, Data10

Disk 1 P0: Data1, Data7
Disk 1 P1: Data3, Data9
Disk 1 P2: Data5, Data11

Or

Option2:

Disk 0 P0: Data0, Data2, Data4, Data6, Data8, Data10
Disk 0 P1:
Disk 0 P2:

Disk 1 P0: Data1, Data3, Data5, Data7, Data9, Data11
Disk 1 P1:
Disk 1 P2:

Dave
 

Red Squirrel

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May 24, 2003
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I believe a "chunk size" is defined, so lets assume 32KB. When a file is written, it writes the first 32KB on drive 1 and the next on drive 2 then back to 1 etc... until the file is all written. There's probably more to it then that but the basic idea is probably that.

A span will write to only one drive, then when that drive is full it will start writing to the next.