Topic: RAID 1?

[Eric]

I attempted to set up RAID 1 software last night on my 4.1.2 E-Smith server.  I have a 30 GB master and a 15 GB slave drive.  Both are ATA 100 IDE drives.  When it finished, and I booted it up I logged on as root.  It can only see the 15 GB drive.  Which I though was odd seeing as how it was a slave drive.

I was wondering if anyone has ANY ideas of what I might be doing wrong?  I'm a newbie with linux, so bare with me.  I find E-Smith to be about 1,000 times more reliable then my previous "windoze" servers.

Please help me!!  

Thanks,

Eric

[Kelvin]

Eric,

Did I understand your post correctly ? You have a 30GB Master and a 15 GB Slave and you are trying to setup RAID 1 on them ?

If so, then you should get a 15GB drive at the end because that's the smaller of the 2 drives. The problem is not with Linux but a little understanding of what RAID 1 does might help you.

RAID 1 (data mirroring) is setup so that any data being sent to one drive is automatically sent to the second drive as well so that if one drive dies, the data is not lost (yes, I'm sort of over-simplyfying). Therefore, your are STRONGLY recommended to use similar (if not exactly) the same drives when creating a mirror pair. If your drives are not the same, the smaller of the two drives determines your final mirror pair (after all you can't mirror 16GBs of data on a 15GB drive, can you ? )

Kelvin

[Eric]

Kelvin,  

Thanks a lot for the info.  I was confusing RAID 1 with RAID 0.

I would like to put the two drives together (30 GB and 15 GB) to equal 45 Gb of space on my server.  Is there another way i can do this using E-Smith 4.1.2?

Thank you so much for your help

Eric

[Eric]

Kelvin,  

Thanks a lot for the info.  I was confusing RAID 1 with RAID 0.

I would like to put the two drives together (30 GB and 15 GB) to equal 45 Gb of space on my server.  Is there another way i can do this using E-Smith 4.1.2?

Thank you so much for your help

Eric

[Steven Reeves]

No.  There is no software raid striping available.

[Dan Brown]

Actually, there is software RAID 0 available under Linux, but it isn't supported by e-smith.  It makes sense, really--if you lose one drive, you've lost everything.  Not the sort of thing you want on a server, where reliability is (usually) critical.

[pkidd]

Do you want RAID anything or just a second hard drive to be in use.  If the latter, a quick search brings up this thread:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=12060.msg45281#msg45281

[Eric]

Yes,

I would like to add a second hard drive to add more space.  I currently only have a 30 GB IDE and would like to add a 15 GB IDE to make a total 45 GB.  Went I install, I don't see an option for anything by RAID 1, which I learned is not what I need. This is a personal server, and the data on it is not all that important.

I there is a way to set up 2 hard drives in version 4.1.2, that would be great.  If I need to upgrade to a different version, that is fine also.

Thanks a lot for the help, all of you

Regards,

Eric

[Kelvin]

Hi Eric,

Search the forums for "second hard drive" or "second hard disk". A note of caution though, further back in the forums, it has been said that what the installation program does on a system with 2 hard drives installed is "undefined" and I can personally vouch for this fact -- it's unpredictable. The moral of the story : disconnect one drive first and install SME on to the boot up drive then follow the instructions to add the second drive as given by a number of other users in the past.

Hope this helps.

Kelvin