dnel
February 12th, 2009, 01:20 PM
Hi, I've recently gone through a hard disk failure and a major PC upgrade in the last few weeks and I'm considering how to rebuild my disk/file-system structure which is a complex issue so I'd like to tap the collective experience for advice.
I have 4 disks
250GB Samsung
250GB Samsung
500GB Seagate
500GB Seagate (once I get the RMA replacement)
I currently host my home directories on the 250GB disks in hardware fakeraid1, I boot off a 5th disk which will be removed from the PC after the work.
What I'd like to do is eliminate the hardware raid and use my only new on-board SATA ports. Having gone from 3 different RAID controllers pre-upgrade I'd like to get rid of the normal hardware raid cross-compatibility issues and use Linux software RAID and/or LVM2.
My current thinking is to backup important data onto the new 500GB disk and erase the remaining 3 disks. I will then create an LVM group incorporating the 3 physical volumes. I'd like to create mirrored LVM volumes for the OS and for the Home directories and then the remaining disk space will be non-mirrored LVM file-storage probably mounted off /media. After wards I will restore the data from the 500GB disk backup and bring the 4th disk into the LVM group and increase the LV sizes.
I guess my questions are:
1.Is this kind of setup possible?
2.Would you recommend an alternative configuration?
3.If I lose a disk will the non-mirrored area be completely compromised or will I just lose a proportion of the hosted files?
4.Can anyone point me towards good and up-to-date documentation on mirrored LVM configurations?
5.Any other pointers or good case examples of multi-disk mirrored home configurations?
6.Seen as you apparently can not boot from LVM, can I create a mirrored boot partition using Linux RAID so that at least the system is not compromised by losing the /boot partition?
TIA
Dave
I have 4 disks
250GB Samsung
250GB Samsung
500GB Seagate
500GB Seagate (once I get the RMA replacement)
I currently host my home directories on the 250GB disks in hardware fakeraid1, I boot off a 5th disk which will be removed from the PC after the work.
What I'd like to do is eliminate the hardware raid and use my only new on-board SATA ports. Having gone from 3 different RAID controllers pre-upgrade I'd like to get rid of the normal hardware raid cross-compatibility issues and use Linux software RAID and/or LVM2.
My current thinking is to backup important data onto the new 500GB disk and erase the remaining 3 disks. I will then create an LVM group incorporating the 3 physical volumes. I'd like to create mirrored LVM volumes for the OS and for the Home directories and then the remaining disk space will be non-mirrored LVM file-storage probably mounted off /media. After wards I will restore the data from the 500GB disk backup and bring the 4th disk into the LVM group and increase the LV sizes.
I guess my questions are:
1.Is this kind of setup possible?
2.Would you recommend an alternative configuration?
3.If I lose a disk will the non-mirrored area be completely compromised or will I just lose a proportion of the hosted files?
4.Can anyone point me towards good and up-to-date documentation on mirrored LVM configurations?
5.Any other pointers or good case examples of multi-disk mirrored home configurations?
6.Seen as you apparently can not boot from LVM, can I create a mirrored boot partition using Linux RAID so that at least the system is not compromised by losing the /boot partition?
TIA
Dave