I'm curious how the concept of partitions (and partition tables) co-exist with the concept of RAID arrays. Here is my current understanding (correct me if I'm wrong anywhere):
A physical hard-drive disk can be partitioned into several segments. A partition table lives at the beginning of the disk space to describe how it is partitioned. There are several partition table types (MBR, GPT, ...)
A RAID array is a single "physical volume" that is comprised of multiple hard-drive disks (i.e. an array). To the OS this appears as a single physical device. Furthermore, this RAID array can be partitioned as a whole.
So my question - if you add physical disks to a RAID controller will that RAID controller automatically hijack each physical disk and blow away/rewrite a single disk partition table such that it controls the entire device? Or are RAID controllers conscious of the fact that individual drives may be partitioned?