I know that the slower disk will constrain speed and the smaller disk will constrain size.
Is it possible to use the extra space on the larger disk in some fashion (ie. as a separate, non-striped partition)?
In my case, this would be with the onboard raid of the motherboard. It is provided by the southbridge, the Intel ICH10R. I'd be interested in Windows XP and Linux situations.
Best Answer
Can and should are two very different things. Even with software raid where you can use the unused portions of the drives for other tasks I would argue that it's a bad idea.
Performance is the only reason to run RAID0. In a RAID0 the IO operations are stripped across all the drives. Now you want a few of those drives to be doing other things on the side. This additional I/O will slow down these disk and as a result will degrade the performance of the entire RAID0 array.