RAID and root

[Jimmie Houchin]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply.
My apologies for the delay. I got swamped at work and haven't been on the 
computer much.
So this reply is written over a two day period. Part immediately after receiving 
and the rest now. :)

Martin Maney wrote:

 > On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 09:59:48AM -0500, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
 >
 >> The install is going fine but I want to use RAID1 on my 4 250gb SATA drives.
 >> The installer says that Ubuntu doesn't do RAID on root.
 >
 > Inherited from Debian, yes.

Ah, okay. It's been a few years since I used Debian. I've been playing with 
Gentoo. In fact my first few installs on this machine Debian wasn't an much of 
an option. I preferred a 64bit distribution and even the 32bit Debian wouldn't 
install because it do the SATA drives, etc. At that time the testing installers 
were still pretty old.

 >> What is the smallest root that I can do and symlink to everything else
 >> on the RAID partitions. In other words I would like to make the root
 >> partition as small as possible but as large as necessary.
 >>
 >> The reason for this is I want all the drives identical. Since I cant
 >> RAID boot or root, I will dd boot and root to the other drives when my
 >> install is finalized. That way the system can reboot as necessary off
 >> any drive.
 >>
 >> I have never done this before and all RAID setup is new to me.
 >>
 >> Any help or wisdom greatly appreciated.
 >
 > The best RAID is hardware RAID, of course - all these problems just go
 > away if you can see your way to picking up a nice 3ware card, plus the
 > entire boot process gets protected against single drive failures.

Yeah, I can see that. This is my first attempt at RAID.
If 3ware was in the budget, I would install it in a heartbeat along with 2 more 
drives to complete the 6 drive hot-swap case. But alas, the budget, ho hum. :)

Well I wrote that two days ago. Since then I've hemmed and hawed and revised my 
budget. :)
I figured it will save me time and effort, and in the long run be the best 
viable solution.

I'm going ahead and adding 2 more WD 250gb 8mb buffer SATA drives and this card.

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid_serial_ata_storage_adapters/1506064.html

Then I've decided to go ahead and do RAID 10 striping 2 drives and mirroring the 
3 sets.
This will give 500gb for data.

Does that sound like a more better way to go? :)

[snip]

 > There, that's my sketchy brain dump on Linux (mostly Debian) versus
 > RAID.  Feel free to ask for more details, but be warned that since I've
 > fallen in geek lust with 3ware controllers I haven't been setting up a
 > lot of software RAID boxes.

Geek lust. mmm. That's a tough one. :)

I understand. I would have done that from the beginning had my budget been enough.

Thanks again.

Jimmie