Topic: Software RAID

[John Simons]

How many people here are using the software RAID?

[Filippo Carletti]

Many.
I use it in production since 1998 when it was alpha. It's rock solid.

[Nathan Fowler]

I use it; no problems.  Allthough it is rather difficult to upgrade a RAID-1 mirror set to a larger drive capacity.  Very little CPU overhead, IDE bus doesn't get over-loaded as much as you would think.  All things considered, it is an excellent option for fault tolerance.  If you have the drives I strongly recommend using it.

Nathan

[dj_ramjet99]

Is it possible to have no RAID on your system disk and RAID on your /home/e-smith/files directory if its mounted on separate disks?

I have an old SCSI that I want the OS on but two new big SCSI disks I would like to RAID for the important data. Can this be done?

[Nathan Fowler]

Yes this is possible and easily accomplished.  I recommend reading the Raid-HOWTO for general information but to summarize it involves:

Creating a Raid-1 Array
  Partitioning the disks
  Formatting the disks
  Editing /etc/raidtab
  Creating the array

Updating the file system
  Updating /etc/fstab to point to /dev/mdX where X is the array number.

[Tom Carroll]

Nathan, do you have a link to the software raid how-to?

With the dropping prices for 7200rpm 80gb disks, I may pick up another maxtor now and set up a raid-1 mirror on my system.

Tom

[Karl Ponsonby]

I've just setup a new Server with 4 ScSi disks in a raid setup.
The O/S is on a pair of 4.5g's (raid 1) , and the /home (which includes ibays and users profiles) is on a pair of 18g drives (raid 1)