I've got 4 identical 1 TB drives and would like to use them in a software RAID configuration on my home server. I'm running Debian Linux using 'mdadm' utility to manage the software RAID. I don't know how much I've read is fact or dated or even false so I decided I would ask here to get help from people who know more about this than I do. This is essentially just a file server machine to store all my data so being that I've got four identical SATA hard drives, I was thinking about doing RAID level 5. I guess I'll start here and ask if that is the recommended level of RAID. I think RAID level 5 will be fine for my general server usage. My second issue is partitioning the four individual drives to get maximum performance / space from them. Basically just asking here how would you or you recommend I partition the drives? I was thinking about doing three seperate partitions per drive: /dev/sda1 = 4 GB (swap) /dev/sda2 = 1 GB (/boot) /dev/sda3 = 995 GB (/) Now from that partition schema above, obviously all the types will be 'fd' for RAID and the partition for /boot is going to be bootable. My confusion is that I read Grub doesn't support booting from RAID 5 since Grub can't handle disk assembly. If /dev/sdx2 (sda2, sdb2, sdc2, sdd2) are partitioned for /boot (bootable), how would you guys configure this RAID to match up equally? I don't think I do a RAID level 1 on 4 identical partitions, right? Can anyone please help and tell me how I should configure these 4 identical drives to work on my system? How would you set this up? -- 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
