Does RAID 5 work with dual operating systems?

Hdesftg · September 3, 2020

I am fairly new to both RAID and linux and I am wondering if it is possible to run pop os and windows 10 at the same time and also use RAID 5 to get the performance and safety improvements that come along with that. The only reason I am skeptical is that there a different drivers for both operating systems needed (I assume) and that they might try and interfere with each other. If anybody knows what happens if I do this I would be happy is someone could explain so that I do not have to risk my entire system.

NumLock21 · September 3, 2020

It will be a pain in the long run, just run 2 separate OSes on 2 separate drives and RAID your data drives.

Hdesftg · September 3, 2020

18 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

It will be a pain in the long run, just run 2 separate OSes on 2 separate drives and RAID your data drives.

So with 3 storage devices ( probable 2 for windows and 1 for linux ) I could still use RAID on all of them at once or set up different each. For instance nothing on linux, but RAID 0 on the windows ssd.

GhostRoadieBL · September 3, 2020

if you have a dedicated raid card you "may" be able to Raid pre-OS and have the card report a single drive.

this is a super odd use case. have you thought about running a virtual machine in PopOS to run windows or vice versa and then you can raid5 on the main OS and have a virtual drive on the VM?

Hdesftg · September 3, 2020

Just now, GhostRoadieBL said:

if you have a dedicated raid card you "may" be able to Raid pre-OS and have the card report a single drive.

this is a super odd use case. have you thought about running a virtual machine in PopOS to run windows or vice versa and then you can raid5 on the main OS and have a virtual drive on the VM?

I have thought about it but I don't think the gains of RAID would be enough if to offset the extra power it and complexity it takes to run a virtual machine. I think the best thing to do would just install each OS on different drives and then just not use RAID on the on the one that has two drives (most likely Windows). Thank you for the ideas though. I may still use a virtual machine for other things; I just do not think that that would be the best way to do it with my hardware. Maybe when I upgrade CPU, RAM, storage, and hopefully GPU but as of now my hardware is to out of date to do something like that with negligible performance differences.