Partition HDD

[videobread]

Anyone recommend a tool to partition my SAS HDD array in Win 7 64. Also, I want to partition my HDD to seperate the Win 7 and Vegas, programs, etc.... and keep the rest as a blank video drive for editing. Is that OK? Am I setting this up right?

[mammo1789]

SAS is Serial Attached SCSIHard Drive basically scasi on sata, any program can partition that hdd for example http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/
I don't want to be smart ass but how expensive was you disk its server oriented and you can have many times the speed with ssd disks which are cheaper and smaller and more reliable

[videobread]

The drives came with the system. They are enterprise drives. My question is, can I partition an array? Right now I have two SAS drives set up as a disk array RAID 0. They show as one big drive. I'm thinking of getting two more SAS drives ($88 ea). Should I get one SATA to use as a boot drive for WIN 7, Vegas, etc. and make the four SAS drives a dedicated video array? Or, can I partition my array with four SAS drives only? My system is wired for four SAS or one SATA and four SAS or five SATA and other combinations. The system is dedicated - editing only.

[jman98]

I think that one SATA boot drive and 4 SAS would probably be the way to go. Having truly separate boot and work drives provides some redundancy. Do note that in this kind of home setup that your drives may well be manufactured around the same time, which means that they may start to fail at the same time. I read a story about a guy who got screwed because his home system suffered TWO catastrophic disk drive failures within a day of each other. He had actually replaced the first bad drive and it was in the process of rebuilding the RAID array when the 2nd one completely failed, killing the array. He had actually done a backup to an internet based backup service "just in case" and he had to use it to get his data back. Really paranoid people might consider just replacing a drive in the array after about a year or so and then waiting some months and replacing another one and so on. It's expensive to replace drives prior to failure, but if you have to have the data you might consider it. Replacing all the drives over the course of some months should lower the chance that multiple drives will fail at the same time. Do note that I'm not suggesting that this will definitely happen, but I just point it out as a possibility. Now if you are just using the array for work space and it's not catastrophic if you have to rebuild the array from scratch then you don't need to do that.

Yes, you can partition an array. That's a function of whatever software you have that controls the array. I would most definitely NOT recommend some kind of partitioning where you create something like a C drive and a D drive and both are spread across all the drives, thus making your entire system at risk of complete loss if 2 drives go bad at the same time.