Setup question (raid 0 and a third disk)

[Jarlax3]

I was wondering if I got a 80Gb disk to use as my system disk and then got 2 40GB disks in a raid 0 to use for things like games, would the games still perform as well as if I ran it all on a raid 0 (system and games)? Or would there be a lot of interaction with the 80GB that would slow things down?

The reason I ask is that I think this would be an easy way to eliminate being down if one of my raid disks failed.

Just a thought, hope I made it clear.

[Pla]

Not to bug you but what if your third disk fails - the non-raid?
You will definetly go down...
What is the chance that 1 of the 2 raid disks will fail of total 3 disks? 66.6%

My point is - you don't really improve very much the probability of failing the system...

I would build everything on the raid system and use the third drive for backing up once in a month.

[Jarlax3]

Your point is a valid one. My question is more of a what if type of thing. My previous system had 2 drives. One that was the system and one that I ran games off of. I would constantly delete and reformat the the second disk just to keep it clean. This is what made me think of the question. That and I have read that the disks that run in a raid 0 array work harder then a single disk and it can shorten the life span. How true that is I do not know, but like I said it was more of a what if.

[aftermath]

the life span is not shortened its just that as the number of disks goes up so does the likly hood of one failing.

ok i think you want to set up raid with to disks and leave one out
that will work fine i have 4 disks set up in raid and 2 disks on the intergrated controlers. there is no slow down from that.

stop reading if that ansers your question cos im going to ramble.

if u want to have raid set up with 2x40 and a 80 in raid 0 then u will need to set this up as virtual disks and only server software will let you go that far and no hardware will do it. what u would need to do is set the second 40 to have a mount point on/in the first 40 this will then act like an 80 gig disk. then u need a nother 80 gig disk set up and upgraded to i think a dynamic disk (forgoten the word think its right(fills u with confidence eh)) then upgrade your virtual disk to a dynamic one and then these can then be set up as u wish. but to do that you need another boot disk for the operatinfg system as dynamic disks ar nonbootable. they need all these drivers and configs loaded before they work. also they are slow and require a lot of cpu time thsi is partly ecause the cpu and operating system are trying to lie to them selve taht 2 40 gig disks are one 80. all in all worth staying lear of. by the right disks. oh and these setups prefer scsi cos its faster.