Striped drive problem

[Lord Flashheart]

Hi
My setup initally i7-3770k @ 4.4 Ghz 32 GB DDR3 1600 Mhz
GTX 1070
Windows 7 64 bit professional
So I have my games on a 2TB hard drive.
I also have 3 old 60 GB SSDs which I can setup in software raid 0.
I use software called primocache to speed it up.
Setting up the striped drive using the SSDs is straight forward. The problem is I want to create 2 partitions on it.
I cannot do that it seems or I am unable to find out.
In total there is 167 GB available.
I want one partition about 50 GB for swap file. The rest is to be used for the primocache software caching and speeding up the gaming HD.
Sensible suggestions please that does not inolve spending money!
Thank you

[Hatman]

You would need a proper RAID (or rather JBOD) solution to do that, from what i gather Primocache is not. It just creates a virtual cache out of multiple discs on the software layer. You can't partition those, as they aren't logical drives for your system.

[Lord Flashheart]

Hatman původně napsal:

You would need a proper RAID solution to do that, from what i gather Primocache is not. It just creates a virtual cache out of multiple discs on the software layer. You can't partition those, as they aren't logical drives for your system.

Software RAID is the only option. Not enough suitable sata 3 ports to do hardware raid. Primocache can use any partition as a cache. Presently it uses the partition with 3 striped SSDs. The problem is that I want to have two partitions there. It seems odd I cannot create two partitions on it. It is not a problem with primocache.

[Lord Flashheart]

TheDot původně napsal:

If you want 50gb for a cache and you have 3 60gb SSDs, then why not combine 2 and leave one loose for the cache?

It is 6 year old machine. The CPU, Motherboard & memory are still great for gaming purposes. Its limitations are the storage interfaces. The whole point of using the striped drive is to get decent speeds. There are no options for a NMVe drive without a whole CPU/motherboard/memory u0pgrade. That is a very expensive solution and not willing to pay stupid money for memory.

So I want to be able to use the 3 SSDs to speed things up a bit. The read speed is 1.2 GB/s with the striped drives. I sata SSD drive is just too slow by itself these days.
So I want both the swapfile access and and the gaming loads at that speed. Presently it can only be used to cache the games.

I could do that if I could simply create 2 partitions on the striped drive. It seems very odd that it is so hard to do.


The boot drive is a 120 GB SSD cached with 8GB memory which speeds up things a lot - much better that windows caching. Also the cache is remembered & reloaded at each boot.

[Hatman]

I missunderstood, so you'Re already using a software RAID and have the 3 SSD striped as one for windows!? Have you tried a partitioning program like Mini-Tool? https://www.minitool.com/

[Lord Flashheart]

I tried it. I does not work. to do so would mean buying the full version which is utterly stupid as I want to partitiaion a drive just once.

[Lord Flashheart]

Hatman původně napsal:

I missunderstood, so you'Re already using a software RAID and have the 3 SSD striped as one for windows!? Have you tried a partitioning program like Mini-Tool? https://www.minitool.com/

1 ssd as boot drive.
3 x SSD in striped I want to use for caching and the pagefile. To do this there needs to be two partitions on the dynamic striped drive.

[Talby]

Beavis původně napsal:

...Setting up the striped drive using the SSDs is straight forward. The problem is I want to create 2 partitions on it.
I cannot do that it seems or I am unable to find out.
In total there is 167 GB available.
I want one partition about 50 GB for swap file. The rest is to be used for the primocache software caching and speeding up the gaming HD....

I think with the way the disk manager works, instead of creating 2 partitions on the stripe drive (which makes sense) in MS land you have to create 2 raid 0 disks - for the 50gb disk you have to create 3 16g or 17gb paritions on the 3 disks then make it a dynamic disk. Then do the same for the remainder of the disk space on all 3 disks and that will give you 2 raid 0 disks you need.

[Lord Flashheart]

Talby původně napsal:

Beavis původně napsal:

...Setting up the striped drive using the SSDs is straight forward. The problem is I want to create 2 partitions on it.
I cannot do that it seems or I am unable to find out.
In total there is 167 GB available.
I want one partition about 50 GB for swap file. The rest is to be used for the primocache software caching and speeding up the gaming HD....

I think with the way the disk manager works, instead of creating 2 partitions on the stripe drive (which makes sense) in MS land you have to create 2 raid 0 disks - for the 50gb disk you have to create 3 16g or 17gb paritions on the 3 disks then make it a dynamic disk. Then do the same for the remainder of the disk space on all 3 disks and that will give you 2 raid 0 disks you need.

Thanks for the info.
It worked. I created two seperate striped drives with different sizes. It is not an obvious way to do things. Thank you