I am looking to rebuild a Vista64 system on a RAID 5 array. My motherboard supports the RAID setup. Can I put multiple volumes on a single RAID 5 array (without losing the data protection)? If I can should I? The main reason is to separate system and data drives, and with the six SATA drives I can use, maximize data space - that's why I'd prefer not to split it into 2x3 drive arrays.

I have an EVGA 680i based motherboard, and have not decided on drives, yet.

Also, can anyone recommend a good power consumption calculator and/or quiet, but powerful power supply? I'm sure I'll need to get a very heavy duty power supply. It will also have to power an EVGA Nvidia 8800GTS video card (possibly a second in the future).

The array will be presented as a single drive to Windows, so you should be fine with partioning it any way you want.

Also - be sure to have drivers available for your RAID when installing Windows, or the setup may not see the drives.

I did not read the specs on the page I reference (but did in the manual). It turns out that page is wrong. Here is the spec sheet. It shows RAID 5 (as does the manual).

Anyway, here is a very good answer I got via PM:
you can PARTITION a Raid 5 array at the OS level into multiple drive letters, but Windows will see it like 1 big physical drive. The crappy nVidia RAID doesnt support the advanced features that Intel does that allows you to seperate the concept of a RAID Group and a Volume.

So say for instance you wanted to have 5 * 640GB drives (This is a real life example using a friend's eVGA 680i board that I ran into a few months back) and you wanted to create 1 massive RAID5 array that is 2.4TB. But because windows has a limitation of 2TB per volume in some cases, you want to have the nVidia RAID make it look like you have a 400GB drive and a 2TB drive (or 500 and 1.9TB, etc), there is NO way to do this with nVidia's RAID.

Intel's Matrix RAID doesnt really do it either from what I understand, but instead they allow you to do something like grab 100GB/640GB from each drive and create a RAID 5 Array that is 400GB (loose 100GB for parity) and then create another RAID5 Array that uses the remaining 540GB on each drive to create the 2TB volume. Doing it this way, Windows will see each RAID5 array as a seperate drive and as long as the 2TB array is really 1.999999TB or whatever, you wont have to do any magic to make it work. Or since its not your boot drive, you can make it 2.0+ TB and when you partition it you use the GPT disk type and it can be as big as you like. But Boot volumes cannot be GPT on most motherboards that use BIOS.
As a result, I think I am going to go with a 4 drive RAID 5 data drive set up and a 2 drive RAID 1 system drive set up. Now to look for a power supply to handle it....

jaburg said:Good call. Using a single multi-drive array for multiple partitions is foolish and asking for a disaster. One physical drive goes out, you are OK as long as you NOTICE (or are warned by the controller) and replace it IMMEDIATELY. Otherwise, one more drive fails and you lose your OS drive AND your data drive in one fell swoop.That's kind of alarmist... If two drives fail you are screwed, yes. Just like if you don't have RAID and have 2 drives, one for your OS and one for your data, and both drives fail. What you said is true, but the way you said it made RAID sound bad or not very good at protecting your data via redundancy, which is just wrong. It is MUCH better than a single drive. As with anything though, if you don't pay attention and it breaks you are in trouble. And it is certainly not 'one fell swoop' - you said yourself one drive dies then later another - that's two 'swoops'

cclyde said:Here is a follow up question on my RAID set up. I am completely rebuilding a system that is currently 2 drives (no RAID). My data drive is a SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ (500GB). I am going to add 3 more of those to make a RAID 5 data volume. I have an old 150GB Raptor drive for the system that I am going to replace with a 300GB SATA II Velociraptor for the system drive. I plan to eventually add another Velociraptor to make a RAID 1 system drive. This will be running Vista 64. Are there any pitfalls in adding the second drive/RAID setup to the system drive in the future?No, not really. You're just going to add the drive, then create a mirror.

Instead of a mirror, I prefer to simply do a full system backup every night. Both have their pros and cons; six of one, half dozen of the other, each results in basically the same end result. I like the full backup because *just in case* something happens to a file (like, my Microsoft Money file was corrupted by some bad data from my bank), I just deleted the original file on the main drive, then copied the backup file over from the backup drive, and started Money over, and it was back to the way it was from that morning. With a mirror, the data would have been written immediately, forcing me to restore from a backup.