Hi, I am new to RAID / md devices, although I've used Linux for a number of years. I decided it was high-time I had a RAID at home for important things (email, web-sites, son's baby pics, mp3s etc.). I happen to have a 3 Seagate 60GB hds and 1 80GB Seagate hd that I am considering using for a RAID. My question is this, is it possible (and even a good idea) to use all 4 hard drives as members of a 4 x 60GB RAID5 array by leaving 20GB of the 80GB drive as a non-raided partition? I'll be using a Promise Ultra TX2/100 controller. i.e. hde -> 60 hdf -> 60 hdg -> 60 hdh -> 60/20 I heard about RAID6 too, though I'm assuming that will use up another disk's worth of disk space too. i.e. RAID5 = 180GB usable size,wherease RAID6 = 120GB .. am I correct in my thinking? I know many of you use far larger hard drives, I'm just trying to use the components I already had spare from a number of machines and reorganize to a RAID-backed fileserver. The machine is a dual pentium-pro 200 (320MB RAM) .. would that be a dumb idea to use RAID5 on it because of the parity calculations needed? Further to that, would it be a smarter idea to use RAID1 on all 4 of some small partition(s) at the start of the disks to house boot/root/usr partitions, and only RAID5 on a larger 'data' area of the drive that is more likely to be read than written to? Comments are appreciated. Thanks, Derek - 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
