Can you explain what you mean, exactly? Do you just mean having two partitions on the same drive used as part of other RAID arrays? That works fine. Having two heavilty used partitions on the same drive causes some performance issues, but no correctness ones. And there's nothing special about RAID for this consideration; it would apply with non-RAID partitions as well. But I have mirrored swap striped across all drives; I don't use swap a lot and it's not worth getting dedicated drives. Likewise, /boot is a 6-way RAID-1 emergency rescue partition. I can boot off any drive, and I have a basic text-mode install with all the disaster recovery tools. Again, not heavily used. If you're doing serious database work, it's common to split the system, log, and database across different spindles. But that's independent of whether RAID is used for any of them. But there are other possible interpretations of "sharing among multiple RAIDs", like hot spares and the like. Could you be more specific? Obviously, having the same partition active in multiple different arrays would be an unmitigated disaster, but I don't think you mean that. (And I don't think mdadm lets you do it, either.) One thing that's very nice about Linux software RAID is that you *don't* have to RAID whole drives. It took me a while to understand Intel's "Matrix RAID" feature because it had never occurred to me that a RAID array *couldn't* be set up that way. -- 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
