> I have 4 500GB drives. Seems kind of a waste to put just /boot swap and > / on the first 2 drives. > 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? If this is a file server too, may I suggest that you keep system stuff separate from your data like Les says he does? Did you have to get real old stuff for your add-on 'raid' controller? A newer and less quirky si3124 based controller cannot be much more expensive than what you have given that you have a four port card. Please put boot and /tmp (maybe 512MB/1GB each) on its own mirrored partition, then make two nice big mirrors from the rest and use lvm to stripe them. That way, you don't have to make a lot of partitions to balance usage to get a four big partitions to get your 'raid10' array. anaconda supports this kind of configuration easily and you can also create the volumes for swap, /, whatever_you_fancy_partition, maybe /opt, /usr/local, /home with anaconda.