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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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How to software RAID 0 on 2 partition of the same drive (for dual actuator drive speedup) under Windows (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.