You "should" have a designated spare for RAID-5. Not sure why you have 3 disks for each RAID1, RAID1 is mirror, and unless the third drive is a spare, it is not needed. Thanks, Tom Callahan -----Original Message----- From: linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Andargor The Wise Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2005 2:10 PM To: linux-raid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: First RAID Setup I admit it. I'm a RAID virgin. However, after a disastrous failure of the sole drive I wasn't backing up, I decided to go RAID-5 under Slack 10.2 (first time ever with RAID-5). The config: Asus P5GL-MX (ICH6) mobo w/1 GB RAM, 4 x SATA ports P4 3.0G/1M 3 x WD2000JS 200.0 GB SATA drives First, a question: the BIOS on this machine seems to list the SATA ports as "third/fourth IDE master/slave". Further, the documentation seems to say that SATA 1/2 are "master" and SATA 3/4 are "slave" (black and red connectors, respectively). My understanding is that SATA drives are each on separate buses. Is this because the BIOS offers a P-ATA emulation mode for SATA and it makes it "easier" to understand for novices to show them that way? I ask because people have said that it is not a good idea to have both IDE masters and slaves on the same bus as part of a RAID-5 array. I know SATA is different, but will using three of the SATA ports on this mobo be OK? Second, after reading the excellent advice in this list, I decided that booting from RAID-5 might not be a good idea. So this is what I've been thinking: Each disk partitioned alike: 1 30MB 2 8GB (to allow for memory upgrades later) 5 rest_of_disk mds: md0 raid1 sda1 sdb1 sdc1 md1 raid1 sda2 sdb2 sdc2 md2 raid5 sda5 sdb5 sdc5 md0 /boot md1 swap md2 / Does this look OK? What should the stripe and chunk sizes be, considering I'll be going with reiserfs? Typical usage: development machine, some DB apps with medium load, read-only mostly, not many writes. Very few large files (such as multimedia). Or should I set up separate RAID-5's for /usr and /var as well? Lastly, can I install directly to this configuration, or should I install on a separate disk and move things into the array? Andargor __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com - 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 - 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
