RAID striping capacity 160GB, C Drive in windows - 240GB

[hereitcomes]

I have set up a striped array with one 80GB disk and one 160GB disk, the array config is fine and shows 160GB total capacity (well slightly less of course). However, when in windows, local disk c: capacity shows the combined capacity of both disks. The disk drive portion of the device manager shows a striped nvidia array, seemingly configured fine. This is a very annoying problem because I can't partition the drive properly, since both partition magic and acronis detect the 240GB total capacity!

I'm using a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 nforce3 motherboard, im 99.9% sure i have the correct and latest drivers. any advice would be most most welcome!

[puntoMX]

You are doing some thing that is not good, but you already knew that. You can’t simply use an 80GB drive and a 160GB drive in RAID. I’m surprised it worked as 240GB but most likely the last 80GB will be at the normal speed of the 160GB drive. It has nothing to do with the drivers; it’s not a "real" software problem.

Just GOOGLE a bit and look what other people have to say about different drives in RAID configuration, but you will only find people that have problems .

[ripken204]

well you can have an 80gig and 160gig in an array but it may not always work. i have no clue why its took the total space tho... but i would recommend getting another 80gig hdd for less that 50$ and raiding the 2 80gig hdds.

[allen2]

It looks like the raid controler/driver understood that you configured a raid 0 array. That's why you get a 160+80=240GB array. Also with theese drives config (1 160 and 1 80), you only coud do a raid mirror of 80.

Edited July 24, 2006 by allen2

[Aegis]

Striping decreases HD life, and it's a pain in the @$$ to get working. If you read Anand's review, you'll also know that there's not really any real-world performance benefits. Why don't you use JBOD?

[ripken204]

Striping decreases HD life, and it's a pain in the @$$ to get working. If you read Anand's review, you'll also know that there's not really any real-world performance benefits. Why don't you use JBOD?

b/c jbod offeres no performance and no redundancy