> There are about as many answers to this as there are people using your > setup Times two. > so let's all agree that there's no "one way" of doing things. I think that's pretty evident. > drives to spare since I upgraded my main fileserver, since mdadm works on > partition level Mdadm does not "work on the partition level". It should work with any valid block device. My data arrays do not have partitioned members. They are built entirely from raw disks with no partitions either underneath or above the md layer. My boot arrays are built from a pair of disks with three partitions - /, /boot, and swap. > I started with creating my root (/) partition on one drive > and setting it to 20gb (/dev/sda1), then a partition for storage > (/dev/sda2 -> /var/storage) with the remaining diskspace. I preceded to > copy the partition table over to my other drives using sfdisk (sfdisk-d > /dev/sda|sfdisk /dev/sdX). Next I created a raid1 using all the /dev/sdX1 > partitions (mdadm -C /dev/md0 -l 1 -n 5 /dev/sd[a,b,c,d,e]1) and after > that created the raid5 (mdadm -C /dev/md1 -l 5 -n 5 -x 0 > /dev/sd[a,b,c,d,e]2) with no spares that's what the -x 0 is for. I prefer to use separate boot drives. I do have the boot drives set up as arrays, but only as RAID1 pairs. The boot drives are set up as RAID1 merely to eliminate down time, not so much to prevent data loss, since the boot drives can in the event of catastrophic failure be fairly easily reconstructed from scratch. > This has the benefit of having a rock solid raid1 configuration for your / > and also benefiting from having a relatively safe storage using raid5. > Also it's real easy to setup and if you want to add more storage you can > just pop another drive in, copy the partition table using sfdisk and add > the new partitions to the existing raid-devices using mdadm. True, but after the 4th drive is added to the array, the level of redundancy for / starts to get rather silly, and the waste of space may start to add up to quite a bit. -- 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
