Installing on software RAID5?

[Robin Bowes]

Hi,

I'm building a storage server for home use with 6 x Maxtor 250GB SATA drives
connected to a couple of Promise SATA150 TX4 controllers.

I plan to create RAID1 mirrors for /boot and swap and create all other
partitions as RAID5 arrays.

Is it possible to configure software RAID at install time with Core 2 or
will I need to create the arrays before I install?

Any hints, suggestions, pointers to information would be greatly
appreciated.

R.

[Jeremy Brown]

robin-lists(a)robinbowes.com wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm building a storage server for home use with 6 x Maxtor 250GB SATA drives
> connected to a couple of Promise SATA150 TX4 controllers.
>
> I plan to create RAID1 mirrors for /boot and swap and create all other
> partitions as RAID5 arrays.
>
> Is it possible to configure software RAID at install time with Core 2 or
> will I need to create the arrays before I install?
>
> Any hints, suggestions, pointers to information would be greatly
> appreciated.
>
> R.
>
>
>   
>  
The FC1 installer supported creating and installing to RAID partitions, 
so I assume this will be the case in FC2 as well.

I was able to create a RAID-1 drive with two 200GB hard drives using the 
installer.

Jeremy

[Robin Bowes]

Jeremy Brown wrote:
>  
>  The FC1 installer supported creating and installing to RAID
>  partitions, so I assume this will be the case in FC2 as well.
>  
>  I was able to create a RAID-1 drive with two 200GB hard drives using
>  the installer. 
Jeremy,

Thanks for this information.

Have you any idea if the installer can create and install to RAID5 or
RAID10?

Thanks,

R.

[Leonard den Ottolander]

Hi Robin,

>  I plan to create RAID1 mirrors for /boot and swap and create all
> other
>  partitions as RAID5 arrays. 
RAID1 for swap? Iirc swap will do striping if you use multiple
partitions (on different disks?) with the same priority. So for swap you
don't even need to setup RAID0. You might want to use RAID0 for /tmp and
/var/tmp however.

>  Is it possible to configure software RAID at install time with Core 2
> or
>  will I need to create the arrays before I install? 
Not sure if the installer has improved in this respect since RHL 7.2,
but you could not set chunk size then. If not you might want to setup
your RAID partitions before doing the actual installation.

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research

[Robin Bowes]

Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
>  Hi Robin,
>  
> > I plan to create RAID1 mirrors for /boot and swap and create all
> > other partitions as RAID5 arrays.
>  
>  RAID1 for swap? Iirc swap will do striping if you use multiple
>  partitions (on different disks?) with the same priority. So for swap
>  you don't even need to setup RAID0. You might want to use RAID0 for
>  /tmp and /var/tmp however. 
General concensus on the linux raid list is that striping swap is bad
because the whole machine will die if one of the disks containing a swap
partition fails. Hence the RAID1 for swap.

Actually, I intend to try putting swap on RAID10 by creating 3 mirrored
pairs and striping all three together. This could be considered to be
overkill!

I'm not too concerned about performance for /tmp and /var/tmp so I'll
probably stick with them on RAID5, although now you've mentioned it I may
consider RAID10 the same as the swap partition.

> > Is it possible to configure software RAID at install time with
> Core
> > 2 or will I need to create the arrays before I install?
>  
>  Not sure if the installer has improved in this respect since RHL 7.2,
>  but you could not set chunk size then. If not you might want to setup
>  your RAID partitions before doing the actual installation. 
Can this be done from a terminal window whilst the installer is running,
i.e. do the raid tools come on the Fedora install disk(s)? Or do I need to
boot from another distro CD, e.g. knoppix or Gentoo and create the
partitions that way?

Do you have any recommendations regarding chunk size?

Thanks,

R.