is there anyway(point in general) to implement RAID on a single disk by making partitions. what iam trying to do is tat iam implementing RAID for testing purposes meanwhile and afterwaeds ill go on purchasing a new disks to implement RAID6. so is there a way....plz respond.

Generally I would say that you cannot create a RAID set with only one hard disk.

Having said that I reconsidered.

If you have virtualisation software (example VMWare Server) you can create multiple virtual disk files on the host machines single disk and can try to create a RAID on a guest operating system.

This would only be worth doing as a training exercise (if then)

Additionally (apart from not protecting against a single drive failure) you will suffer performance issues as the "RAID set" is using the same physical disk and therefore your disk head is going to be very busy.


I have not tried this myself and do not guarantee success.

thanks for the respond Disillusionist.
i will reconsider wat i was going to do.

Actually you will configure Raid on single disks in most Linux class rooms for test purposes.

You will not get a productive functionality but you could train the usage of the raid toolset.

Wouldn't that classify as a training exercise?

mdadm will let you create arbitrary raid types out of arbitrary member partitions.

It's not entirely uncommon to have several disks (say, 4 drives) that have a couple partitions each, with each partition participating in some different sort of raid (eg: raid-1 across 4 disks for the really really important stuff, raid5 for the fairly important stuff, raid0 for the performance-sensitive but otherwise unimportant stuff ...).

Similarly, it's not at all uncommon to do exactly what you're doing, and mdadm supports just that precisely for that purpose.

thanks for the tips all.guess i will have to wait for the new disks to be bought till i implement raid6 meanwhile i maybe test raid by tat virtualisation software.

ok now i have one new drive, can raid be implemented on linux installation disk and a separate new disk?