On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 02:26:46PM +0000, Russ enlightened us: > I'm not sure what you mean by "get real old stuff for your controller". The controller is brand new, although the pc is a few years old. The controller is si3114 based. What's so quirky about it vs si3124? > > Here's the way I plan to set things up. Please let me know if this is worse then what you suggest. > > 4 partitions per drive > 1st partition - 200 mb > 2nd partition - 250 mb > 3rd partition - 5gb > 4th partition - 745gb > > Md0 raid 1 with 2 spares - 1st partition of all drives - /boot > Md1 raid0 - 2nd partition of all drives - swap > Md2 raid6 - 3rd partition of all drives - / > > After install create > Md10 raid10 - 4th partition of all drives - /data > > What advantages, if any, would lvm have over this set up? I would not make swap a RAID 0. Ever. It is fairly rare on systems to actually use swap, so they don't need to be *that* fast. And if you lose a drive, the system might chug along nicely until you try to access swap, in which case I imagine the machine would crap all over itself. I would make those partitions RAID 1, or perhaps a pair of RAID 1 md's with equal priority. Matt -- Matt Hyclak Department of Mathematics Department of Social Work Ohio University (740) 593-1263