linux-raid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I originally sent this to Neil Brown who suggested I sent it to you. Any help would be appreciated. Has anyone put an effort into building a raid 1 based on USB connected drives under Redhat 3/4 not as the root/boot drive. A year ago I don't think this made any sense but with the price of drives being far less that then the equivalent tape media and the simple USB to IDE smart cable I am evaluating an expandable USB disk farm for two uses. A reasonable robust place to store data until I can select what I want to put on tape. The second is secondary storage for all of the family video tapes that I am capturing in preparation for editing to DVD. The system does not have to be fast just large, robust, expandable and cheep. I currently run a Redhat sandbox with a hardware raid 5 and 4 120G SATA drives. I have added USB drives and have them mount with the LABEL=/PNAME option in fstab. In this manner they end up in the right place after reboot. I do not know enough about the Linux drive interface to know if USB attached devices will get properly mounted into the raid at reboot and after changes or additions of drives to the USB. I am a retired Bell Labs Research supervisor. I was in Murray Hill when UNIX was born and still use Intel based UNIX in the current form of SCO Unixware both professionally and personally. Unixware is no longer a viable product since I see no future in it and Oracle is not supported. I know way to much about how the guts of Unixware works thanks to a friend who was one of SCO's kernel and storage designers. I know way to little how Linux works to get a USB based raid up without a lot of research and tinkering. I don't mind research and tinkering but I don't like reinventing the wheel. I have read The Software-RAID HOWTO by Jakob 0stergaard and Emilio Bueso and downloaded mdadm. I have not tried it yet. The system I have in mind uses a Intel server motherboard, hardware raid 1 SATA root/boot/swap drive, SCSI tape drive and a 4 port USB card. In a 2U chasses. A second 2U chassis will contain a supply, up to 14 drives and lots of fans. I have everything except the drives. The sole use of this system will be a disk farm with a NFS and Samba server. It will run under Redhat 3 or 4. I am leaning toward Redhat 4 since I understand SCSI tape support is more stable under 4. Any comment in this area would also be appreciated. Can you point me in the direction of newer articles that cover Linux raid using USB connected drives or do you have any suggestions on the configuration of a system. My main concern is how to get USB drives correctly put back in the raid after boot and/or a USB change since I do not know how they are assigned to /dev/sdxy in the first place and how USB hubs interact with the assignments. I realize I should have other concerns and just don't know enough. Ignorance is bliss, up to an init 6. Thank You for your time. Bill Hess bhess@xxxxxxxxxxxx - 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
