How to software RAID 0 on 2 partition of the same drive (for dual actuator drive speedup) under Windows
How to software RAID 0 on 2 partition of the same drive (for dual actuator drive speedup) under Windows
Hello!
I just got a Seagate Exos Mach2 dual actuator sata drive and am trying to create a RAID 0 out of the two halved partitions in order to mimic what the SAS version does with the two LUNs and basically double the potential speed by using both actuators simultaneously.
I cannot however seem to figure out how to create this striped volume, as the disk management options are all greyed out. I've tried switching the disk to dynamic as well, and it's the same thing.
I'm not too sure how to achieve this, since RAID usually requires disks and not partitions, but it's definitely achievable under Linux: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to-zfs-on-dual-actuator-mach2-drives-from-seagate-without-worry/197067
Anyone know? The limitation being of course, Windows.
Just an update here, and if anyone finds this thread later on - I was successful!
Not in Windows however, I had to create the array using mdadm and with the use of WinMD 3rd party driver, to allow it to be mounted on Windows.
For reference, here are Disk Mark tests before and after.
It's not quite 2x the performance, but it's definitely better, and best of all, it was free performance!
Isn't that what it does by default...?
Should be really easy to confirm just by doing a simple benchmark read on the device, probably a few GBs would do (more to make sure there aren't any RAM caching shenanigans).
for testing, you can create two VHD virtual disks on the drive and mount them as RAID0. This way you can try out if the method have any benefits or not.
however I doubt about the method, because your partitions, or VHDs are linear. One is at the beginning of the disk and fast, other is the second half on the disk which has slower access speeds and also the throughput is slower.
The benefits exist for sure, due to the SAS version that exposes them as two different drives, which you can easily raid and get the full expected 500mb/s. The SATA version, which I have, and cheaper ofc, doesn't do it that way, even though you can split the drive in two and independently, both run at the max regular 250mb/s speed, I'm trying to "hack" the same solution to extract the benefit, but it might indeed not be possible due to the limitation of them being partitions and not drives.
Can't do that in the boot volume.
Probably can't do that from the GUI either
Just an update here, and if anyone finds this thread later on - I was successful!
Not in Windows however, I had to create the array using mdadm and with the use of WinMD 3rd party driver, to allow it to be mounted on Windows.
For reference, here are Disk Mark tests before and after.
It's not quite 2x the performance, but it's definitely better, and best of all, it was free performance!
Did you do anything special after installing WinMD? I was able to create an array in Linux (with NTFS) and verify the speeds there -- it was 1.8x-ish faster -- but it's not recognized in Windows after installing WinMD. I just get "WinMD controller" in device manager but no volumes show up.
