Raid one

[Les Mikesell]

Karl Larsen wrote:

>> RAID is generally used because of a need, rather than simply because you
>> can do it.  Of course, if you're doing this as a learning exercise,
>> that's another matter.
>>
>> Some benefits of RAID, depending on the type, *can* be faster access to
>> data spread over more than one drive (though your current system might
>> be more than fast enough, making this pointless), or having a spare
>> drive that *can* let you keep on working when one drive has failed
>> (mirroring - useful for servers, probably less important for stand alone
>> client machines in the home), or increased storage space by using an
>> array of drives as if they were one big one (which can also be done
>> using LVM).
>>
>>   
>    No my need is to have a backup in case this hard drive quits working. 
> I can do this with rsync. But I am getting the data needed to make a 
> raid-1 and it would be fun to make one just for the experience :-)

Disk failure is the most likely thing to go wrong, just not the only 
thing so you still need some other kind of backups.  Raid has the 
advantage that you can recover more quickly if you go down at all (IDE 
drive failures often hang the computer until you remove them) and you 
don't lose the data past the last backup run.  Disks are pretty cheap 
these days and they fail unpredictably about like light bulbs.  If you 
want to make things slightly easier, set up a machine with 3 or 4 disks 
and don't bother with raid on the system portion which you can easily 
re-install.  Just add a pair of drives with one big parition in a raid1 
configuration and move your /home to it - or set it up that way during 
the install.  Then you just have to save or remember any special 
configurations in /etc and keep your important work under /home.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com