well i always wondered this and it may be a stupid question but is it possible to do raid 0 with 1 drive?

nope. you need at the very least 2 physical hdds, preferrably of equal capacity and performance.

the reason being because the performance boost comes from interleaving data stripes between 2 or more physical hdds (which is why raid 0 is called striping)... but with only one physical hdd, you wouldnt be able to interleave the data between any other hdd, and would gain no performance from it

performance though is only really beneficial to a few specific uses though anyhow (eg, large data transfers due to higher str; editing large audio & video files), which is not something that an average desktop user would make much use of (such as browsing online, playing games, etc)

Hahaha.... No. The clue is in the question... RAID = Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks. Array = more than 1.

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

Well you can pretent is RAID and just say it is

Actually, everyone who's posted thus far is wrong.

It is possible to do RAID 0 with 1 disk. There's no reason to, you'll end up with a slower system than if you just had a single disk, but it *is* possible.

You'll need to use software RAID, rather than hardware RAID, but you can take two identically sized partitions on a single disk and stripe them together.

Again, *why* you would do that is beyond me, but...

My old A7V8x mobo came with a FastTrak376 RAID controller, and this controller allowed to create a RAID0 array with a single disk... it worked as if it was in JBOD mode, but it was considered as a real raid0 array

but it must be specific to that model.... anyway, RAID is supposed to work with at least 2 disks

hm... you might be able to i guess

i do remember a few years ago when i tried using the disk management console (diskmgmt.msc) on a dynamically converted disk, and attempted to set a single hdds multiple partitions up in raid 0 on the same hdd, that it didnt work... i guess using a different application it might be, if its physically possible

@raytracer06 - that must be what its saying then on the promise fasttrak s150 tx4 pci raid controller... ...a couple weeks ago i installed it with a single raptor in my brothers system (he doesnt have any sata ports on his mb)... and it registers as jbod in the controllers bios setup (when you dont select raid 0, 1, or 0+1)... but when you see the post screen come up during startup, it says 0+1 (for one hdd), instead of the normal 0+2 +3 or +4 (for each additional hdd in raid 0)... i didnt think much of it really, but that makes sense then

>diskmgmt.msc

My suspicion is that you couldn't do it within Windows, actually. It should be relatively easy to do it under Linux using mdadm. Linux cares a lot less about the hardware it's running on

ohh, okay, i dont doubt it then, especially after the controllers , speaking of linux, not to hijack the thread though, but i would really want to learn how to use it, ive tried both mandrake and ubuntu (ubuntu is supposed to be fairly easy ive heard), but each time i couldnt get past the seriously inhibiting mental blocks i had about it... ended up botching ubuntus installation almost right away every time with anything i did too, particularly after driver installations lol... the live cd wasnt that bad though (since i couldnt change anything really)... but it really shouldnt be 'nearly' that difficult though to get a hang of

I went on a course to learn how to use Linux - if you want to teach yourself I'd suggest working through something like O'Reilly's "Running Linux" - or "Linux in a Nutshell".

You have to be a lot more prepared to do things from the command line when it comes to Linux. Once you can get your head round that you can get your head round the GUI easily.

I can confirm that with Linux at least you can create a RAID0 configuration with just 1 disk using software RAID. You can even do this at install time. All you do is create two RAID partitions and then you can do what you want with them regardless of what disks they are on. You could even go to town and create 3 RAID partitions and set them up in a RAID5 configuration.

Zero point to doing it, mind you, except as a learning exercise.

thanks i think i may just try those

Partition your drive into 9 identically sized partitions, RAID 5 each trio, then RAID 5 the 3 resultant RAID 5 volumes!

(aka "how to kill your CPU with XOR calculations" )

haha i was wondering that... my fasttrack controller allows me to use raid 0 with one drive. now i know that it actually slows the drive down instead of speading it up. Thanks for the help guys

You can do it with software RAID, but the bigger question is, why would you want to?

The relative write and read speed of any single drive is quite slow compared to the rest of your PC, so you gang them up and have the information split up and sent to and from more than one drive at a time, effectively giving you a boost in large file transfer speed.

(I know, I know, just how much it actually helps has a wide variety of opinions)

Putting software RAID on 1 drive would probably significantly lower the performance of the drive, and double the chance of data corruption on a single drive.

I was so astounded when I saw this on the front page scrolling by that I had to come here to ask you if you are retarded. So, are you retarded or something?

RAID 0 on a single drive.......what a tard!!

haha, i wonder if you knew you could do raid 0 with a single drive...

most people think you cant but you actually can do it with a single drive.

now my question is why would someone want raid 0 on a single drive when it offers no speed gain or anything? also why did the "raid god " allow raid 0 to be used on 1 drive? ( what purpose did it serve? )

That's unnecessary. It's that he's retarded, either. This question is everything that's wrong with RAID 0 marketing hype. It has been reduced to the flashy name everyone wants, without understanding of what it does and how it works, and all the benefits and drawbacks, and who should use it. At least 90% people on these forums are in the same boat with respect to what I said. Granted, they may not ask this particular question.

To the original poster: Yes you can, but you most definitely should not.

>I was so astounded when I saw this on the front page scrolling by that I

apparently had to come here and post without reading the thread...

>RAID 0 on a single drive.......what a tard!!

He didn't say he wanted to do RAID 0 - he just asked if it was possible. Which it is.

No, there is no such thing as RAID 0 with a single drive, that just has to do with improper naming schemes. Any single drive on my RAID controllers are considered RAID 0. But as the RAID 0 definition requires an array(multiple drives), there is no such thing, it would be called striping on one drive, and that would be useless.