Software raid questions

kwiqsilver · Guru Joined: 19 Mar 2003 Posts: 360

I have two 120GB drives that I'd like to have as raid0 devices and had some questions.
My mobo has two ATA133 ports, so I'd have to put my dvd+rw on the same cable as one of the drives. Would that be a problem?

How well does it work? The two disks get 40-50MB/s on hdparm tests, would it go up significantly?

How would I install it? I have gentoo running on one of the disks now and don't feel like spending days reinstalling it. I have another disk that I could put in and do a cp -aRp (are those the correct options?) on to back up the OS and data, but then what? Do I use the LiveCD to set up the RAID? Would I have to do the kernel work and change /etc/fstab on the drive before transferring it to the raid pair?

Anything else I'm not thinking of?

Thanks.

Heretic · Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2003 10:48 pm Post subject:

Software RAID works very well. You have to setup your partition in fdisk with type 'fd' = Linux Raid Partition

If you don't want to lose your current installation, compress your root directory and store it on a different harddrive. Then use a liveCD to boot and setup your harddrives with RAID, then copy the root filesystem back onto the RAID. It's pretty easily actually. I have a RAID1 setup with LVM on top of that.

Search this forum for "software RAID" and you should find plenty of information. Just watch out with RAID0, if one of your harddrives dies, you've lost all your information on both.