How to create a terabyte storage array?

[Anders Karlsson]

On 11/30/05, Soo-Hyun Choi <shchoi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for your reply.

No problem,

> Okay, then it would be better to go for RAID-5 instead of just RAID-0.

RAID-5 is somewhat more fault tolerant shall we say. :)

> How did you set up your RAID system? What sort of process should I
> follow?

How did I set my system up? When I installed Breezy, and I got to the
partition part, I partitioned each of the two discs with a 2GB first
partition, and the second partition was what was left on each disc. I
set both partitions on both discs to be RAID candidates. Then I
created the two mirrors, put a ext3 filesystem on the first one (md0,
2GB, root fs) and marked the second (md1, 73GB) as an LVM PV. From
that point on, I created the VG and all the LV's as per normal.

I only used two 80GB discs and I used RAID-1 (mirroring), but the
process for a RAID-5 array is the same.

When you install the system, I would suggest you do the following, get
5 x 250GB discs, PATA or SATA is up to you and dependent on the disc
controllers you have or will get for this project.
If you get PATA discs, get five high quality 80-wire cables.
Personally, I would only put one disc per IDE port on the controller
cards.

If you use SATA discs, you have little option, one disc per SATA
port/cable I believe.

When you install your system, I do not think you can put your root
filesystem on a RAID-5 unit, so you can do one out of two things. Get
a sixth disc, 20-40GB is more than adequate, install the OS on that,
create your RAID-5 array on the five big discs. Alternatively, create
a small (512MB - 2.0GB) partition on each of the five discs and make a
five-way mirror to use as a root filesystem.
All other filesystems you can have on the RAID-5 device.

> So, if there is a WinXP client, would this person also be able to gain
> an access to this RAID disk array?

If you create a filesystem and export it via SAMBA or NFS (would
require a NFS client on the XP system) - yes.

> Thanks again,

HTH,

--
Anders Karlsson <trudheim at gmail.com>