Is the following possible with raid 1?

[MikeMike]

i just lost like 40 gb of data cuz my hd failed and it pisses me off.

but if i raid 1 a 120gb wd and a 80 gb maxtor, with the 120 set as main, can i partition it so that only 80 gb of it is raided and i could possibly use the other 40 as like a linux partition w/o it being raided?


onboard raid on a abit it7 max v1

 

[Lord Evermore]

You can RAID different size drives, but you can't access the excess space on the larger drive. The RAID controller controls access to the drive space, so you can't "partition" the space on the drive the way you want to. You set the RAID BIOS to read only 80GB of the larger drive, and RAID the space with the 80GB drive, and the RAID controller will only report that 80GB space to the operating system (assuming you want RAID 1 mirroring). It will simply ignore the remaining empty space.

You might not get the best performance from such a mirror of course, due to different densities and drive performances (a striped array would be worse probably, but with mirroring, the controller has to wait around for both drives). Better to get a couple of drives of the same type and mirror them. Or better yet, just get a backup device and software and make regular backups so you're not so pissed off by failures.

 

[everman]

It might be possible to do software raid with a 40 gb partition on the 80 gb drive with the 40 gb drive, and still use the other half of the 80 gb drive. I don't really know much about it but have heard of it.

 

[MikeMike]

i probably wont do it any way was just wondering b/c if it was easy i would have

now to ener scsi cheaply with hyper micro or just wait?