On Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 11:31:07AM -0800, it wrote: > The hardware raid does the mirroring on the block level, so it's > actually /dev/sda mirroring /dev/sdb - the whole drive, and not > partitions. There is a way to set this up on software raid. It takes > more configuration tweaking, but the mirroring then includes the > partition table as well. This way, if a drive fails, one can replace it > without pre-partitioning it. That can be less flexible though. If I have say 4 drives then I quite often want small /boot, / and swap under RAID-1 then the rest as a single large partition in RAID-5, -6 or -10 as an LVM PV. > This also raises another point, which is relevant for both cases - same > exact models of hard disks have different number of cylinders, so if a > RAID partition is created on a larger drive it cannot be mirrored to a > smaller drive. Same exact models don't usually have different block counts, but certainly if you replace a dead drive with a different one of the same advertised capacity you can end up getting one slightly smaller. > Does anyone have any experience with this? Yes, and it's a pain, but if you have to deal with it I think the wealth of options in md leaves you better able to handle it than with hardware RAID. Here's something that happened to me: http://strugglers.net/wiki/becks.strugglers.net -- http://strugglers.net/wiki/Xen_hosting -- A Xen VPS hosting hobby Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
