[Novalug] Hard Drive Data Recovery

[Mike Shade]

Performance would suffer, but sure, you could do RAID 1 (mirror) with 2
partitions.  You could even do RAID5, but that'd just be crazy.  Parity
partition would do you no good in this circumstance.

Thinking deeper, it might even push the drive towards failure faster, since
a mirrored partition on the same disk will create twice the reads, twice
the writes, and thus, twice the amount of seeks.  That pushes the drive
mighty hard, and could potentially crash it prematurely.  If the drive
physically fails, no amount of redundant partitions on the same drive will
save  you.  Typical failures from being driven too hard aren't bad blocks,
but crashed heads.

-- Mike
PS - don't do it! Really!



On Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:34:14 -0400, Angelo Bertolli <angelo at freeshell.org>
wrote:
> I've had the worst luck with hard drives.  For me it's a combination of
> having crappy electrical wiring with voltage flux whenever something
> gets turned on, and with lack of climate control for the heat.  But
> usually, I find that only a PORTION of the disk gets messed up, and I
> can recover by marking the bad blocks.  That's fine but very annoying.
> 
> But here's the crazy thing:  I spend decent money to get a 160G hard
> drive only to use about 4G of it!  So my questions to this group is:
> can I set up some kind of RAID with partitions of the same drive?  The
> redundancy would at least help me to keep my data from permanent
> damage.  I know it's not "safe" to rely on that, but I figure if I'm not
> using the full drive anyway, why not set it up just in case it helps?
> 
> Angelo