RE: BOOTING WITH A RAID 5

Richard Lachance ( (no email) )
Mon, 29 Jun 1998 11:55:13 -0400

> keep thing seperate. As far as performance, this is hardware RAID. All
> of the partitions are striped across all of the drives in the array, so
> it doesn't make any difference if you have one partition or ten. Every
> time a read or write operation is done, all of the drives in the array
> are accessed because the data is striped across the entire array.

With two partitions on the same (non-RAID) drive, the first partition starts
at the physical beginning of the drive while the second one start in the
middle of the drive (assuming partitions of equal sizes). If the I/O
activity pattern is such that the heads have to constantly switch between
the two partitions, the distance of the head movement is longer than if
everything was on the same partition and your performance is actually
slower... The gist of my question then is how are multiple partitions
physically created on a striped RAID?

Regards,

Richard.
Vircom, Inc.

PS: 2G limit for the O/S partition? I have NT boxes running on 4G and 9G
O/S partitions.