> Couldn't find an authoritative answer to this in the faq or elsewhere... > Is it preferred to build md sets out of whole disks or of partitions ? > Is there any functional reason why either one is better ? as others have pointed out, there's little reason (save a track on whole-disk, lose partition-type-0xfd auto-detection). however, if you go the partition route, don't go too far! I've seen several cases where someone gets overly enthusiastic about multiple parallel raids across a small set of disks. they wind up shuffling the heads between partitions for an obscene fraction of time. this can be especially noticable with journalling filesystems, since they tend to do synchronous log forces on a regular basis. don't even get me started on people who set their mail spools to pure-sync! (hmm, why can my awesome new quad-opteron mail server only receive 10 email/sec?) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html