Rudi Ahlers writes: > On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 7:59 AM, Ren Wen shan <renws1990 at gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hello everyone, >> >> I am new to this group so please forgive me if this question has been >> already asked. >> >> With four identical hard drives, I want to setup RAID 5 + 1 hot spare by a >> fresh CentOS (6.3) installation. >> >> I have read this article ( >> >> http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/s1-raid-config.html >> ) >> and watched this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm3MkuTfDLw), now I >> have the basic ideas. >> >> However, due to my limited experience and knowledge on this area, I am >> still confused. >> >> To make things easier, I only need a swap and a `/' partition. >> >> Could you give me any hint on this? What should I read to get the basic >> knowledge? How can I setup a simple RAID 5 + hot spare? >> >> >> Regards, >> - Meatball >> _______________________________________________ >> >> > Since you're new to this list, and this topic, I'm going to spare you the > headache. Don't use RAID5 Even with a hot-spare, if you use large drives > chances are you'll loose everything if one of the drive fail and you need > to rebuild the whole set. > > Rather use RAID 10. The newer CentOS installation disks has an option to > setup RAID10, alternatively. > > There are numerous tutorials out there on how todo it, but this one seems > quite easy to follow: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlOK1voR2nA Hi Rudi, Thanks a lot for your reply, the video is very helpful. I read this discussion on serverfault.com http://serverfault.com/questions/106131/raid-5-with-hot-spare-or-raid-10-with-no-hot-spare but still quite confused as some people think RAID-10 is way safer while some people wrote: " I'd have to disagree with CHopper3. Since there are only 4 drives in this situation your failure capabilities are the same (2 drives) with either scenario, except with raid 10 if you happen to lose the wrong 2 drives then you'll have a real problem. Also there is definitely an added benefit of having a global spare for your other RAIDs as well. " My new question is: As RAID 10 requires at least 4 hard drives (not very sure about this information), with only 4 hard disks, is RAID-10 without hot spare a better solution than RAID-5 + 1 hot spare? Why or why not? -- Wenshan Ren Email: renws1990 at gmail.com Blog: wenshanren.org Douban: www.douban.com/people/renws