Help me partition my drives!

Personally, I find it's pretty useless to install the OS and it's programs on two separate partitions. However, it is much more efficient to partition some space for your pagefile. (2GB is more than enough.) Meanwhile, I simply haven't bothers to do that.

I run a small dedicated fileserver with Windows 2003 instead of loading up my gaming rig with hard drives. That, and the fact XP can't do RAID1 or 5. I don't have to deal with backing up if I need to format, or even worry about losing my data. I built the server for under $300 not including hard drives.

For partitioning... if you're going to format your drives anyways, use the Windows XP installer to partition. It's very straightforward.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

RAID 0 definitely doesn't halve your read and write speeds. It should be close to doubling them. It works like that because data and data transfer is split in half between the two drives. You have two drives reading or writing each half of the data simultaneously, instead of just one doing all the work. Keep in mind, that if one drive fails, you lose ALL the data in the setup.

RAID 1 is mirroring, essentially being just an exact copy of another drive. Read performance will greatly increase, but writing will be the same or slower than using no RAID at all. Like you quoted, RAID doesn't guard against any errors that might occur as a result of your RAID setup, just from one disk failing.

RAID 5 is the same as 1, but uses an extra drive for keeping track of data integrity. Read and write performance should be the worst out of all three setups.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by BlueBomber

Well...I wasn't sure. I've heard so many positive things about RAID, but then Free.User gave that article saying that it may not be such a hot idea for a home pc :/. One of my buddies has it and absolutely loves it. Maybe I'll give it a try. What's the difference between a software RAID and a regular RAID? Or are they the same thing...

If you're worried about losing data on your RAID0 array, either install a backup drive, use RAID1 or 5, or simply don't do it at all. RAID 1 and 5 will be null if you're looking for pure speed performance.

Software and hardware RAID are quite simple. Software RAID is handled by the OS. This results in some extra CPU power being required, but I've read it's next to none for a dual drive RAID0. Hardware RAID is when you're using the onboard RAID functions on your motherboard or you're using a PCI card that will add those functions.

The only reason you would consider software is if your motherboard doesn't have RAID capability. Unfortunately, I'm not certain if either method is more reliable than the other. Maybe someone else can shed some light on this.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.