> Which one is the better choice and what are the trade offs? Or is > another configuration more sensible? I'm under the impression that you > shouldn't (can't?) boot from RAID 5. Depends very much on what you're going to do with the system - I've found a high performnce impact of raid5 for database applicaions with frequent updates (where you end up with lots of small writes scattered allover the partition). If write speed isn't too important, the space savings may well make raid5 more attractive. True, you can't boot directly off raid5, but you can have a /boot on raid1 and the rest of the system on raid5. Also, you definitely should consider putting swap on raid1: otherwise a failure of the swap disk will bring you system down.(don't put swap on raid5 - same performance issue as mentioned above.) A minimal configuration for 4 disks optimized for max space could be like this, though you might want seperate raid5s for /, /usr, /var. Each disk partitioned alike: 1 30MB 2 1/2 size_of_swap_ 5 rest_of_disk Now you can create mds on the disk: md0 raid1 sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 md1 raid1 sda1 sdb1 md2 raid1 sdc1 sdd1 md3 raid5 sda5 sdb5 sdc5 sdd5 md0 /boot md1 swap md2 swap md3 / You've got a small 4-disk raid1 as /boot, so each of our disks can be bootable. Swap is on 2 2-disk raid1 partitions so your system can survive failure of a disk used for swap. Main data storage is on 4-disk raid5. Bye, Martin - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
