Ruslan Sivak wrote:
> I'm not looking for total reliability. I am building a low budget
> file/backup server. I would like it to be fairly reliable with good
> performance. Basically if 1 drive fails, I would like to still be up
> and running, even if it requires slight reconfigurations (ie recreating
> the swap partition).
I like to keep things simple-minded and not fight with anadconda.
During the install, put /boot, swap, and / on your first 2 drives as
RAID1. After that works the way you want, build whatever layout you
want with the rest of your space and either move your /home contents and
mount point over or mount it somewhere else. A nice feature of this
approach is that you can upgrade to pretty much any other version/distro
by building a new set of system disks and swapping them in, keeping
your data intact. I also like to use disks in swappable carriers and to
keep a spare chassis around. That way you can use it for testing things
and developing your next version but if your production motherboard
fails you can just move the drives to it and keep going.
> If 2 drives fail, I would like to still be able to be up and running
> assuming I wasn't unlucky enough to have 2 drives fail in the same
> mirror set.
> If 3 drives fail, I'm pretty much SOL.
> The most important thing is that I can easily survive a single disk
> failure.
If you can deal with the space constraints of partitions that match
single disk sizes by mounting them in appropriate places it's hard to
beat RAID1. If everything fries except one drive you can still recover
the data that was on it - plus it gives you natural boundaries for
backups which you shouldn't ignore just because you have raid.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com