RAID Partitioning

[lynwode]

Having had a disaster upgrading from Gutsy to Hardy I have made the decision to reinstall Gutsy.

I have also decided to go RAID. I am trying to set up RAID via the installer however I am unsure of what structure the partitions should take and in what step to create things. Also where does LVM come into the mix?

I have 4 x 320GB SATA drives that I would like to set up as RAID 5. Can anyone provide any ideas of how I shoudl go about this.

Cheers,
Tim.

[pparks1]

Well, first things first. You don't want to install your operating system onto a RAID 5 array. If you are doing a software based RAID, it likely won't even allow this. You do NOT want your system calculating parity for temporary files, etc.

I would seriously install 2 x XXGB drives in a RAID1 mirror for the OS and then use the 4 x XXGB drives in a RAID5 array for data.

LVM is logical volume management. The benefits here is that you can keep adding on disk space onto a volume and grow the volume as need be. However, there isn't fault tolerance by default with LVM's. You are just more or less pasting hard drives together to present 1 large volume with an LVM.

[lynwode]

Thanks for your response.

If I were to go down the track you suggested how would I set this configuration up in the installer?

Tim