On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 10:53 PM, Chris Weisiger <cweisiger at bellsouth.net>wrote: > I have been reading about software raid. I configured my first software > raid system about a month ago. > > I have 4 500 Gig drives configured in RAID 5 configuration with a total of > 1.5TB. > > Currently I configured the complete individual drivers as software raid, > then created a /dev/md0 with the drives > > I've read (and would agree) that using the entire drive can hide the fact that a softraid is there. If you set up a partition on the disk and mark the file system as type "fd" then no matter what you know that disk is part of a softraid array. What you configured works. Is it wrong? No. > I then created a /file_storage partition on /dev/md0. > > I created my /boot / and swap partitions on a non raid drive in my system. > > Is the the proper way to configure software raid? I generally use LVM on my systems, so my layouts has /boot carved out as its own partition and then another partition for the LVM PV. And if you use standard partitions instead of LVM, then create individual softraid arrays for each partition. * Remember, /boot can only be on a raid1 software array. Veering slightly from your original question... I recently set up softraid arrays by hand before invoking the Anaconda installer (on a 6.3 install). Recent mdadm packages that ship with CentOS support metadata 1.1 and 1.2 (... actually defaulting to 1.2 I believe), but GRUB 0.97 only supports metadata 1.0 and not the metadata version that mdadm defaulted to. On my CentOS 5 installs in the past I've specifically set --metadata=0.90 to avert any catastrophes like this. Fun problem to troubleshoot ... I knew it once that system wouldn't boot though. Kind of odd that the installer didn't pick up on the metadata version and flag it or modify it. In the end I ended up rescuing the system by backing up and recreating the /boot softraid with metadata 1.0 :) > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > -- ---~~.~~--- Mike // SilverTip257 //