Ruslan Sivak wrote:
I didn't think you were duplicating / across all 4 in the layout you proposed. Thus the questions about putting /boot there. If your /boot doesn't work you can always boot the install cd in rescue mode to fix it but there's not much you can do about a missing /.
Originally I had boot on 2 drives raid1, with 2 more drives being hotspares. Then I realized that this makes no sense, if you can just set up a raid1 with 4 drives (where each drive is a copy of each other). Didn't really know if it was supported, but looks like it works.
I don't think there is a limit. I have one set built with 2 250 gig internal drives plus one specified as 'missing'. I periodically connect a matching external firewire drive, add it to the array and let it sync. When it is finished I unmount the partition just long enough to fail the drive and remove it, and then rotate it offsite. This is for a backuppc archive which has millions of hardlinks from its pooling scheme that would make it difficult to copy with normal file oriented methods.