[CentOS] RAID help

Tue Dec 14 18:37:22 UTC 2010
Jason T. Slack-Moehrle <slackmoehrle at me.com>

Hi All,

I have a new system with 2 Seagate 1TB SATA Enterprise level drives in it.

I want to RAID1 (mirror) these drives. 

This machine will be a web-server in my apartment hosting an HTML video fan site I am creating. Apache, MySQL, PHP etc. This site will easily be 300+ gigs with all the versions of each video, the MySQL won't be huge, but will grow as data for each video is added (i.e location on the server, keyframe name, etc)

I am a bit confused by: http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/s1-raid-config.html

So if I simplify, I must:
1. Create a software raid partition on each drive
2. Create a RAID 1 out of that partition and use a mount point of /boot

3. Create other mount points I might want i.e swap, /home, etc
4. Create RAID1 out of these partitions

5. rinse and repeat this for each mount point I want

A few questions:

1. This system support 16gb of RAM. I have 9gb in it, but I will max it out over the next few months as I find great deals on RAM, what should my SWAP space be? I recall a long while ago that SWAP should match physical RAM.

2. Any reason I can't just create a single mount point taking up the entire drive and RAID1 the entire thing? Can anyone recommend some ideal mount points and sizes? 

3. What should I account for if my /var/www/html will be very large?

Best,
-Jason