software RAID-0 recommendations

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 10:18:10AM -0500, Christopher J. Bottaro wrote:
> i just bought a motherboard with onboard SATA RAID and two SATA hard drives
> for my linux box before i realized that you can't utilize the onboard RAID
> controller when installing linux.  so i'm left with linux's software RAID
> option.  

For what it's worth, the "onboard" RAID of most motherboards is actually
software RAID as well. And Linux's implementation is likely better anyway.


>           i've seen two software RAID setups and i'd like to ask your
> opinion on them:

Also, I'd recommand not using RAID 0 -- there's really not much point, since
you can mount partitions whereever you want and put symlinks however you
want. Basically, all RAID 0 does is double your chance of catastrophic drive
failure. Personally, I use RAID 1 -- mirroring -- for my home system.

> the first method is simpler, but has the disadvantages of having a
> needlessly large /boot partition and also not having swap on the RAID.  are

You don't need to have swap on the RAID partition. In fact, if you have swap
on two disks, Linux can (it's the default, even) intelligently round-robin
between them. But really, if you're using *any* swap, it's time to get more
RAM. :)

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>