Intel RAID - Better to create two RAID0 Volumes or one RAID0 Volume & partition it ?

[Defenestration]

I currently have two 500GB HD's with a 630GB RAID0 Volume and a 150GB RAID1 Volume (using onboard Intel Matrix RAID). The RAID0 Volume is partitioned into an 80GB C: partition, with the remainder as my D: drive.

I will be getting another couple of drives soon, which will enable me to have two drives as a RAID1 Volume, and the other two as a RAID0 Volume (which I'll split into two partitons again).

I'm wondering if there's any performance advantage to creating two RAID0 Volumes in the BIOS (which automatically show up in Windows as two partitions), when compared to creating a single RAID0 Volume in the BIOS and then partitioning this Volume into two partitions (with a partition manager tool) ?

[Rosaline]

I believe that both solutions would be effectively the same in performance.

[Agent]

If you want to be pedantic, you could argue that the partition closest to the edge of the disk would have slightly better performance due to CAV (Constant angular velocity).
Again, you could argue that using multiple volumes / partitions would help slow fragmentation on each others partitions, if you accessed data in such a way.

In a 'real world' scenario? I doubt there would be any difference.

[master811]

Originally Posted by Defenestration

I'm wondering if there's any performance advantage to creating two RAID0 Volumes in the BIOS (which automatically show up in Windows as two partitions), when compared to creating a single RAID0 Volume in the BIOS and then partitioning this Volume into two partitions (with a partition manager tool) ?

There should be no performance differnence I'm sure, it doesn't matter if you make them via windows or via the BIOS, they'll still be the same.