RAID 1 Config with AMD 780G Chipset

[Paul McCumber]

It did help.   Everything went very smoothly after this and I've been
loading it up ever since.  

Thanks for the help, Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
[mailto:ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Owen Townend
Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2008 3:20 PM
To: Ubuntu user technical support,not for general discussions
Subject: Re: RAID 1 Config with AMD 780G Chipset

2008/10/27 Paul McCumber <pmccumber at comcast.net>:
> Just getting started so obviously I have questions about step one.   The
> instructions I have say:
>
> * Use the dialog boxes to create one primary partition large enough to
> hold the root filesystem
> * For "How to use this partition" select "physical volume for RAID", not
> the default "Ext3 journaling file system"
> * Make the partition bootable.
> * Use the dialogs to create one other primary partition taking up the
> remaining disk space. Later this will be used for swap.
> * For "How to use this partition" select "physical volume for RAID", not
> the default "Ext3 journaling file system" and not "swap area"
>
> My QUESTION is, I have two 1 TB drives, and I'm building two partitions
> in the above steps.   It says, build it "big enough" to hold the root
> file system and the use the rest for swap.   Really?
>
> How big would y'all make the first bootable part and then the second
> one, the swap?
>
> Thanks in advance, Paul

Hey,

That depends entirely on your use-case...

Swap space size used to be recommended as twice the size of your ram
but it seems that now you only need _at least_ your ram size to fit
hybernation/suspend images.  With the amount of space you have
available it would not be unreasonable to do that.

As to other sizing, some people like to have a single, huge, /, others
prefer to split their system into many partitions: Often /, /boot,
/usr, /home and /var are all separate and sometimes logs, apt cache,
mail spool and others too.

One approach is to set up LVM, make reasonable space for at least /
and /home and swap and leave the rest empty for later expansion as
needed.

You may want /boot to be a partition of the md device instead of
within LVM, I haven't yet played with that combination, but a little
research ahead of time may save you hassles later. Depends on what
grub can now handle...

You can leave out LVM entirely but I have found with large amounts of
space it is easier to fsck many smaller filesystems than one large
one.  Some apps will use all the space given to them (mythtv for one)
so it makes sense to give them discrete chunks.

Summary:
 One partition on each disk set to 'physical volume for RAID'
 One mirror/stripe md array
 LVM on the md device (possibly /boot also)
 LVM volumes for each desired separate filesystem (rootlv, homelv,
swaplv...)
 filesystems on the LVM volumes (/, /home, swap)

Hope that helps,
cheers,
Owen.

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