On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 11:30 -0700, Craig White wrote: > I have a new server to setup. 4 hard drives and I had intended it to be > hardware raid but that's a long story. > > Does it make sense to set up the first two hard drives with RAID-0 > partitions and then get through the install and then go back later and > then create identically sized RAID-0 partitions on the other two drives > and finally create the RAID-1 mirror from the first to the second? I suggest that you consider LVM over RAID 1. Since you have 4 disks, I would make a small RAID 1 on your first two disks ( or if you are using IDE disks, the primary and secondary masters ) to be /boot ( GRUB doesn't work with booting directly from LVM ) and then create one or more RAID 1 devices in the remaining space. You then use the RAID 1 devices as physical volumes in the LVM setup, and create logical volumes however you wish. My own "personal opinion" is that I use one RAID 1 device to support a volume group that I call "sysdisk" and use for "system" filesystems such as /, /var, /tmp, and swap. I use any additional RAID 1 devices in a volume group I call "export" and put all of my data ( home directories, downloaded audio/visual media, ISO images, etc. ) in logical volumes/filesystems there. One of the benefits of LVM is that you can have more than one physical volume ( PV ) in a volume group, which will let you construct logical volumes ( LV ) that are larger than your hard disks. You can also resize LVs/filesystems and do some other useful things. My $0.02 (US) worth. > > Craig > > -- Ron Loftin reloftin at twcny.rr.com "God, root, what is difference ?" Piter from UserFriendly