hardware question [2]: SATA RAID

[Darryl Clarke]

On 5/12/06, Matt Price <matt.price at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> SO I'm going to put two 300-gig SATA drives in my new system, and I'm trying
> to decide whether or not to use RAID in them.  I guess RAID 0 (striped)
> seems too risky, while RAID 1 (mirror) seems like a tremendous waste of
> space...  what I'd really LOVE to do is to have some (absolutely crucial)
> partitions (/home, /usr, /etc) mirrored and other, less essential partitions
> (/music, /videos) striped.  BUt I also imagine that's impossible.  I
> justwanted to check in and see how other people have managed similar issues.

Based on theory, you can do exactly as you stated. :)

If you create identical partitions on both drives, the mdadm tool can
be used to create the different types of raid.

I'd try something like this:
sda1:sdb1 / (19gb)
sda2:sdb2 /home (80gb)
sda3:sdb3 /storage (200gb)
sda4:sda4 swap (1gb) * depending on your system, really...

Then using mdadm I would create a mirror of sda1:sdb1 (md0), sda2:sdb2
(md1), and a stripe of sda3:sdb3 (md2), and enable both swap
partitions seperately

You would effectively end up with a 19gb system, 80 gb home, and 400gb
of 'storage'...

Of course, mixing raid types on the same drive might cause a
performance hit, maybe it won't matter, I can't verify that though.

-- 
~ Darryl  ~ smartssa at gmail.com
~ http://darrylclarke.com