On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Tony Molloy <tony.molloy@xxxxx> wrote: > On Tuesday 04 September 2012 15:20:26 Paul Tader wrote: >> > The second MD1200 will be used to backup the first, using >> > BackupPC and for other storage purposes. >> > >> > As I won't know the storage requirements for the "backup >> > partition" and they will probably change over time anyway. I was >> > thinking of using LVM for it. So how to partition the MD1200 for >> > LVM. I don't want to put all 12 disks in a RAID5 and put a LVM >> > volume on it. Can I split it into 2 RAID5 and have a LVM volume >> > spanning both. >> >> Just a thought about the backup volume. >> >> Because it going to be used for backups and your retirement >> (congrats!) I would configure one partition and no volume >> management on top. Why? Because backups are like insurance >> policies. That are not fun and no one reviews them, but when you >> need them, you really hope that everything is in order. So you >> don't want the next admin to find out several months or years down >> the road that the backup software ran out of space and has been >> failing to back anything up for the previous few months. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> CentOS mailing list >> CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx >> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >> > > > Thanks to Gotz, Blake, Paul and Nate for your advice. > > I was pretty happy with the split RAID 5 for the NFS partitions on the > first MD1200. > > I think I'll go with the simple solution for the backup MD1200. A > single RAID 5 encompassing all 12 disks probably with 2 hot spares. > Put an ext4 on top of that without the complexity of LVM. > > Thanks, > > Tony > > aside Paul, unfortunately my retirement is not voluntary. It's due to > a spinal cord injury but such is life ;-) I would highly suggest RAID 6 if you are dealing with drives over 2TB in size. Errors during rebuild happen and rebuild times for 2TB+ drives can get pretty long, especially if you are building one 12 disk RAID. Also important if a non-savvy admin is going to take over administration. What if they pull the wrong drive during a replacement on a failed RAID5 array? _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos