Can I make a RAID 1 of two drives of different sizes by having a partition on the larger drive that's the same size as...

Can I make a RAID 1 of two drives of different sizes by having a partition on the larger drive that's the same size as the smaller one?

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yes, it's called a software raid

Yup, partitions are a modern miracle.

Yea, mdadm doesn't care.

You might also like snapraid if you intend to later grow the array.

>>Yea, mdadm doesn't care.
Neither does Btrfs. ZFS has some mumbo-jumbo about wanting to be fed whole disks, but partitions work fine. the only thing that breaks if you use partitions is that you can't take the disks out of your little-endian x86 box and put them in a big-endian machine and have them work.

note that with all of these you only get the capacity of the smaller disk.

>you only get the capacity of the smaller disk
This does mean I can take the remaining capacity on the larger disk, make it a separate partition, and Wangblows will treat it as a separate disk, right?

it definitely works that way on Linux. I don't know what retardation Windows might or might not do with software RAID though.

What about if my motherboard supports it natively?

Don't do hardware or firmware RAID. Just don't.

Then that's hardware RAID. Well, not really, your CPU still does the work of it, just like software RAID, but it's managed by firmware instead of by the OS.

The Linux world calls this "fakeraid" and sneers at it, since it basically combines all the downsides of hardware RAID with all the downsides of software RAID, in addition to often being just plain buggy. Don't use it.

Do not touch motherboard RAID
Ever

Pic related will be you in a week

Wangblows has no RAID solution that isn't grade D retarded

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If I want to do raid on windows 7, what do?

I lost 400GBs of data doing exactly what you are considering and it was so upsetting I packed ship for linux and debootstrap my stuff directly onto ZFS.

You have options:
mdadm: Boomerware, good performance little resiliency.
ZFS: Old mule, relatively "slow" but physically incorruptible.
BTRFS: Wild child with crazy features, fucks your shit on occasion but you'll not lose the data.

All of which are on linux.

Don't touch windows RAID unless you like silent corruption.Hhaving it be proprietary means you can't reach out to some source guru who can figure out what fucked your shit as a matter of interest because he, too, hosts his data on what he programs.

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ignore this guy
use mdadm RAID1 + zfs
all you ever need

why the fuck would you put ZFS on top of mdadm? That defeats all the fancy shit ZFS does for you.

But I don't want to have another computer on for raiding a couple of disks. I have no idea how to install or use Linux at all.

why are you here asking questions if you don't want to learn stuff?

The whole point of ZFS is that it performs the management for you.
You lose access to SMART assessments when you layer another block device on it.

If you're just putting it in a LUKS container, sure, or a multipath.

But managing ZFS for ZFS spells massive trouble because it is programmed with the assumption that it is running on raw disks, and there have been known incidents in the past where people didn't heed this warning.

You also lose performance by doing this. It might look faster but that's just kernel cache which is lying to you and may break CoW make sure to benchmark with fsync.

>If I want to do raid on windows 7, what do?
Install Gentoo

cant I just buy a prebuilt NAS that connects 24/7 to my windows 7 computer while it does raid 1? Also my computer has only 1 ethernet port

Linux doesn't care what distro you run, you can install plain Ubuntu and turn it into a bangup hardened ZFS behemoth if you want. Grab something and get to work if you want to check out what sensible RAID can do.

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I have no will to learn Linux, I just want raid 1 on 4 drives. Will the Synology DS918+ 4 Bay provide easy configuration?

Simple AF. Actually with 4 drives you can run raid 10. I have a Synology RS815+ at work that's been solid

Linux is the better way, but snapraid exists on Windows.

Zfs is amazing, except that adding storage is a sort of pain in the ass

snapraid isnt actually realtime raid

It isn't realtime standard raid, no. It's basically "eventually consistent" (in reality usually almost instantly consistent...) erasure coded storage. Should work pretty good for most people's usage.

I don't understand why you wouldn't just use an LVM.