Les Mikesell wrote: > 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. > I have 4 500GB drives. Seems kind of a waste to put just /boot swap and / on the first 2 drives. >> 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. > Unfortunately this is my backup server, and also file server. While I may move the file server part out to another box in the future, for now it's going to be serving two roles. I would like to be able to depend on it. In the future I might set up a backup of this server to be on Amazon's S3. Is there a linux program that interfaces with it? Russ