[CentOS] Install to internal USB?

On 2013-11-08, Lists <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote:
>
> The idea is to use an internal USB adapter and a couple of bigger USB 
> thumb drives to install to, RAID 1 style, freeing up all your external 
> drive bays. At first, I didn't think that a thumb drive would hold 
> enough for the O/S, but in actual production use for a file server with 
> 14 TB of redundant storage, the OS actually uses less than 6 GB!

Yeah, thumb drives have really gotten enormous over the years.

My concern about the above would be, if one drive fails, you have to
down the box, or at least slide the case out and open it, in order to
change it.  I would be slightly more inclined to do this with external
drives.

Question: does the controller backing the four hot-swap bays support
device carving?  You can take one RAID array and expose two volumes to
the OS, which appear as separate devices.  Both 3ware and MegaRAID cards
support this; I imagine Areca does too.  One downside is that you can't
replace the entire RAID5 on the fly, since it has your OS.

--keith

-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us