Russ wrote: > 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 Suit yourself. I personally do not see the point of 2 spares when your system uses raid6. > Md1 raid0 - 2nd partition of all drives - swap This is a no-no. > Md2 raid6 - 3rd partition of all drives - / Overkill. Why have so many different raid running? Besides, raid5 has been iffy and I wonder how stable raid6 is. > > After install create > Md10 raid10 - 4th partition of all drives - /data > > What advantages, if any, would lvm have over this set up? How about flexible filesystem resizing? If you did it the way I suggested: 512MB /boot, 512MB /tmp, you have like 960GB of space to carve anyway you like. You also get lvm snapshots which you won't get with raid seeing that this is supposed to be a backup server too.