nate wrote: > > Therese Trudeau wrote: > > > Ah great i'll check out the URL thanks. > > > > One thing, an earlier poster reccomended RAID 5 instead of RAID 1. > > I guess if one only has 2 drives RAID 1 is the way to go but if I have 4 > > drives he said go with > > RAID 5 over RAID 1. Isn't RAID 1 mirroring a better solution for a 4 drive > > array or am I missing something here? > > Depends on your needs, RAID 1 is certainly faster. RAID 1+0 faster > still, but requires more disk(s/space). > > Going back to my preferred array vendor, 3PAR, their software/hardware > provides the ability to do online RAID conversions to/from RAID 0, 1+0, > and 5+0 (3+1 parity to 8+1 parity) with no impact to the server. It > also provides the ability to run multiple raid levels on the same > physical disks because the RAID is made up of portions of the disks > (each disk split into 256MB chunks), rather than the full physical disks > themselves. Really flexible/powerful/fast. I love it! On my array I > run RAID 1+0 on the outer regions of the disk(~7% faster than > the inner regions), and RAID 5+0 (8+1) on the inner regions of the > disks. > > Of course this sort of technology isn't priced for the desktop unless > your doing something like desktop consolidation with virtualization or > remote application hosting/thin client. I just had to put my .02 in here: The key requirement here is technology for the desktop. Since this is going to be a single user box I really do not recommend mucking around with hardware RAID at all. You have 4 disks, create a software RAID mirror out of disk 1 and 2, and a software mirror out of 3 and 4. Make a VG out of the first mirror, call it "CentOS" and put the OS and all your applications there, including "home". Make a VG out of the second mirror, call it "Work" and put all your work material there. Then you can always upgrade the OS disks without touching your work disks. You can export your work disks VG, move the disks over to a new machine and work there. Create snapshots of your work disks, backup your work onto your OS disks, etc. A couple of 80 or 160GB disks for the CentOS VG, a couple of 320GB disks for the Work VG and your good to go. If you want any advise on setting up LVM and LVs for different file systems I, and everyone on the list, would be happy to give their opinions. This is the easiest, most flexible and fastest way to get a good performing redundant desktop setup. -Ross ______________________________________________________________________ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 3971 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20080310/5eab4993/attachment-0005.bin>