I would welcome comments on sensible chunk and stripe settings to use for my first venture into RAID which I will be setting up over the upcoming holiday quiet period. The array will be setup as a Linux MD RAID 10 f2. It will have either three 500GB SATA II 7200rpm physical drives or possibly 2 x 500GB drives plus 1 x 1TB SATA II 10Krpm drive divided into two 500GB partitions for a total of four devices. I have decided on this setup from almost two years of lurking on this list. I will be working my way studiously through 50 pages of the wiki overview on the linuxfoundation.org website before I begin any actual setup. Even so, I would welcome a message off-list from a more expert user ready to field a question from a first-timer. Personal background: I am recently retired. I have never been an IT professional; on the other hand, as an amateur, I have been happily breaking alpha and beta software for the last 27 years --- that is, from long before GUIs migrated from PARC into the commercial world. I pride myself on being a quick study. The primary goals of setting up a RAID array are education and performance. BTW, I do not confuse RAID with backup and have religion on the importance of multilayered onsite and offsite backup. My strategy has just been tested less than a week ago by the sudden (and apparently irretrievable) failure of the data drive on my primary workstation. It is this workstation which I will rebuild over Christmas with a RAID array; the fallback old desktop computer is just not as pleasant to work on <grin>. -- Bruce Miller, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada bruce@xxxxxxxxxxx; (613) 745-1151 A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. - Franklin D. Roosevelt -- 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
