RAID array to choose?

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Got a new hard drive last night and it's been asking to configure it. Anyone know which RAID array to create? Spanning or Striped? I have one hard drive with a rescue partition. The Drive is 1TB

What do you want to do with the 2nd drive--I assume you have two now have drives, as can't do RAID with one.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/a ... ur_pc.html
Here is a good tutorial. You can use two drives to simulate one faster drive.

Beware of using RAID with two drives for BACKUP--if a hacker corrupts your drives you will likely lose EVERYTHING!! ! At least one web site has disappeared because the owner thought RAID would work for backing it up.

there is one physical drive, two partitions.

You need at least two physical drives for RAID in any configuration.

physical drives?

Our new one keeps asking us to configure it in a striped or spanning. Perhaps it thinks there are two or more physical drives?

That sounds more likely to be a RAID-aware controller BIOS than a drive. Drives can't really 'ask' for anything (poor word choice but you see what I mean) - they just get told what to do by other stuff and it's that 'other stuff' displaying the configuration screen.

Since you can't really do RAID with just one drive you might as well disable whatever it is and stop it from asking, and use the drive conventionally.
There's usually a hotkey available to get into a configuration screen - IIRC F9 or F6 is typical - but the screen asking for configuration detail should give more information on that.

"ask" for want of a better word.

Just that every time we restart the computer, a window comes on telling(?) us to configure the drive.

Hmm - no option displayed to enable/disable this action?
Failing that, it may be possible to disable it directly in the machine's BIOS setup screens. There's usually stuff in there to disable on-board sound, network controllers etc. and the RAID capability could be a sub-option in the disk controller section.
That said, some disk controller firmware is just plain dumb and it may not be possible to tell it to stop carping on about it.

(apologies: the comment about poor word choice was on my poor use )

If you wanted to do a proper RAID wouldn't you want to get separate drives? Your ok for right now if you're worried about viruses, however if you're actuator arm goes - there goes everything on both partitions. I don't know if there are simultaneous write options for each half, that might be worth a shot, you could also just make sure to send your nightly or weekly drive backups to the other side of the partition, I'd suggest the backups as it would be less likely to interfere with performance aside from whatever designated times you have set aside.

Not without multiple actuator arms and associated buffering.

Even if it were possible to do a raid with two or more partitions on a single drive, what would be the point? I can see no possible advantage to doing that. All it would accomplish is to decrease performance with no benefits at all.

I don't even understand what language is being exchanged in this thread.

It *is* possible to configure RAID (especially software RAID) on a partition level. I've done it a few times, but always in very special circumstances. And, obviously, never on one physical drive (though it appeared that way to the OS).

Once a few years ago, I used disk striping to make a small partition on each of three drives into a single drive just to see if it was worthwhile to improve speed. After two or three weeks and not that much of a difference in speed, I got rid of the raid. While it was striped, I had it do a backup of the raid drive a couple of times a day.

But multiple partitions on the same drive would be pretty useless.

This thread is from 2011???