Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread SilverTip257
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 8:56 PM, Chris Weisiger cweisi...@bellsouth.netwrote:

 Im not so much concerned about the os not being on a raid system. I am
 really concerned about my data, music, pictures,docs, etc.


True, the data is generally more important than the OS (or hardware - you
can buy more).


 I run a minimum os centos 5.9 install anyway so it would take long to
 reload the os if i had to.


BUT do you _really_ want to reload the OS and have to tweak config files
again?
Especially if you do not have the OS on a raid volume, back at least /etc/
up nightly or weekly (whatever fits your scenario) so you have at least
some config files to go off of.

There's a fellow on the Gentoo Forums that has a signature that says:
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

You might be lucky, but you won't want to get caught if your luck to drys
up! :)



 -Original Message-
 From: John R Pierce
 Sent: 3/5/2013 6:45 PM
 To: centos@centos.org
 Subject: Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual
 partitions

 On 3/5/2013 4:27 PM, Mark LaPierre wrote:
  The question is why are you using raid at all?

 indeed.   the primary justification for the R in RAID, Redundant, is
 high availability. having the OS on a non-raid volume completely
 violates this.RAID is most definitely NOT a substitute for backups.


 --
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 somewhere on the middle of the left coast

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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Mark Snyder
Chris,

I've used software raid quite a bit, and have developed a few rules of thumb, 
hope these help!

- Use one raid array, generally md0, for /boot, and one for LVM, md1. This 
allows the individual drives to be mounted and read on another server for 
recovery if you're using RAID1.

This is generally how the drives in a RAID1 array would look. This is from a 
CentOS 5 server, so /boot is only 100MB, on CentOS 6 it would be 500MB. 

# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot  Start End  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *   1  13  104391   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda2  14   30401   244091610   fd  Linux raid autodetect

# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
  104320 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md1 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
  244091520 blocks [2/2] [UU]


- Avoid software RAID5 or 6, only use it for RAID1 or 10. Software RAID5 
performance can be abysmal, because of the parity calculations and the fact 
that each write to the array requires that all drives be read and written. 
Older hardware raid controllers can be pretty cheap on eBay, I'm using an old 
3Ware on my home CentOS server. Avoid hostraid adapters, these are just 
software raid in the controller rather than the OS. Even with hardware raid 
performance won't be near as good as RAID10, I generally only use RAID5 or 6 
for partitions that hold backups.

If you are using drives over 1TB, consider partitioning the drives into smaller 
chunks, say around 500MB, and creating multiple arrays. That way if you get a 
read error on one sector that causes one of the raid partitions to be marked as 
bad, only that partition needs to be rebuild rather than the whole drive.




Mark Snyder 
Highland Solutions 
200 South Michigan Ave., Suite 1000 
Chicago, IL 60604 
http://www.highlandsolutions.com 



- Original Message -
From: Chris Weisiger cweisi...@bellsouth.net
To: centos@centos.org
Sent: Monday, March 4, 2013 9:53:48 PM
Subject: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

I have been reading about software raid. I configured my first software raid 
system about a month ago.

I have 4 500 Gig drives configured in RAID 5 configuration with a total of 
1.5TB.

Currently I configured the complete individual drivers as software raid, then 
created a /dev/md0 with the drives

I then created a /file_storage partition on /dev/md0.

I created my /boot / and swap partitions on a non raid drive in my system.

Is the the proper way to configure software raid?
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Les Mikesell
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:00 AM, Mark Snyder
msny...@highlandsolutions.com wrote:

 I've used software raid quite a bit, and have developed a few rules of thumb, 
 hope these help!

Do you (or anyone...) have any rules of thumb regarding drives over
2TB or using raid sets that were created on Centos5 under Centos6?   I
once booted a centos5 box with the initial centos6 'live' CD and it
permanently broke all of the auto-detected mirrors so I have been a
little reluctant to it again.

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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Gordon Messmer
On 03/04/2013 07:53 PM, Chris Weisiger wrote:

 Currently I configured the complete individual drivers as software
 raid, then created a /dev/md0 with the drives

If you configure an entire drive as a raid device, you'd have a device 
name like /dev/mdp0, which you'd then partition.  I think what you've 
done is created only one partition per disk, and made those partitions 
into a RAID set.  That's not wrong, but it's not the same thing.

Non-partitionable RAID sets such as the one you've created are the most 
common configuration for software RAID.  Hardware RAID volumes are 
almost always the partionable type.

 Is the the proper way to configure software raid?

Proper is relative to its fitness for a specific purpose.  As you 
haven't indicated a specific purpose, proper doesn't have any real 
meaning.

The array you've created will work, and it will protect your data from 
loss due to the failure of a single disk.  You need to make sure your 
root mail is delivered to someone who will read it in a timely manner, 
or else that protection is not useful.  The array's performance will be 
relatively lower than a single-drive configuration or a RAID10 
configuration, but that may be acceptable for bulk storage.  The array 
will not protect you from filesystem corruption or from accidental 
deletion.  Subject to those and other limitations, your array seems more 
or less proper.
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Gordon Messmer
On 03/05/2013 05:58 AM, SilverTip257 wrote:

 Veering slightly from your original question...
 I recently set up softraid arrays by hand before invoking the Anaconda
 installer (on a 6.3 install).  Recent mdadm packages that ship with CentOS
 support metadata 1.1 and 1.2 (... actually defaulting to 1.2 I believe),
 but GRUB 0.97 only supports metadata 1.0 and not the metadata version that
 mdadm defaulted to.  On my CentOS 5 installs in the past I've specifically
 set --metadata=0.90 to avert any catastrophes like this.

As far as I know, GRUB 0.97 only supports metadata 0.90, as does LILO. 
Anaconda will create arrays with 0.90 metadata for this reason.

The kernel wiki disagrees with me:
https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_superblock_formats

Debian's documentation indicates that only grub 1.98+20100720-1 or later 
will boot from a RAID volume with a newer metadata format:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#mdadm-metadata
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Gordon Messmer
On 03/06/2013 08:00 AM, Mark Snyder wrote:
 - Avoid software RAID5 or 6, only use it for RAID1 or 10. Software
 RAID5 performance can be abysmal, because of the parity calculations
 and the fact that each write to the array requires that all drives be
 read and written.

My understanding of Linux mdadm RAID5 is that a write will read the 
block being written and the parity block.  The calculations can be done 
with only those blocks, and the two are written.  That's one extra read 
per write plus parity calculations.

I'm quite certain that I've seem some hardware RAID arrays that will 
read the entire stripe to do a write.

RAID5 will always write more slowly than RAID1 or RAID10, but that can 
sometimes be acceptable if capacity is more important than performance.

 Older hardware raid controllers can be pretty cheap
 on eBay, I'm using an old 3Ware on my home CentOS server.

If there's anything to avoid, it'd be old 3ware hardware.  Those cards 
are often less reliable than the disks they're attached to, and that's 
saying something.


 Avoid
 hostraid adapters, these are just software raid in the controller
 rather than the OS.

All hardware raid is just software raid in the controller rather than 
the OS.  The advantages of hardware RAID are offloading parity 
calculations to dedicated hardware so that the CPU doesn't need to do 
it, and a battery backed write cache.

The write cache is critical to safely writing a RAID array in the event 
of a power loss, and can greatly improve performance provided that you 
don't write enough data to fill the cache.

The host CPU is very often faster with parity than the dedicated 
hardware, which is why Alan Cox has been quoted as saying that the best 
RAID controllers in the world are made by Intel and AMD.  However, if 
you think you need the couple of percent of CPU cycles that would have 
been used by software RAID, you might prefer the hardware solution.

 If you are using drives over 1TB, consider partitioning the drives
 into smaller chunks, say around 500MB, and creating multiple arrays.
 That way if you get a read error on one sector that causes one of the
 raid partitions to be marked as bad, only that partition needs to be
 rebuild rather than the whole drive.

If you have a disk on which a bad sector is found, it's time to replace 
it no matter how your partitions are set up.  Drives reserve a set of 
sectors for re-mapping sectors that are detected as bad.  If your OS 
sees a bad sector, it's because that reserve has been exhausted.  More 
sectors will continue to go bad, and you will lose data.  Always replace 
a drive as soon as your OS sees bad sectors, or before based on SMART data.

Partitioning into many smaller chunks is probably a waste of time.  Like 
most of the other participants in this thread, I create software RAID 
sets of one or two partitions per disk and use LVM on top of that.

Hopefully BTRFS will simplify this even further in the near future. :)
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Les Mikesell
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Gordon Messmer yiny...@eburg.com wrote:

 Hopefully BTRFS will simplify this even further in the near future. :)

I wouldn't hold my breath.  Someone on the backuppc list reported that
it had a tiny limit on hardlinks which would make it seem to me like
they don't quite understand how filesystems are supposed to work.

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lesmikes...@gmail.com
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Gordon Messmer
On 03/06/2013 11:49 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
 I wouldn't hold my breath.  Someone on the backuppc list reported that
 it had a tiny limit on hardlinks which would make it seem to me like
 they don't quite understand how filesystems are supposed to work.

The limitation was fixed in 3.7:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15762

I think the btfs developers understand quite well how filesystems are 
supposed to work.  As best I understand it, the limitation was a result 
of back-references, which are an important feature to keep inodes from 
ending up as orphans.  If you're going to have an on-line fsck, that 
matters.
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Les Mikesell
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Gordon Messmer yiny...@eburg.com wrote:
 On 03/06/2013 11:49 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
 I wouldn't hold my breath.  Someone on the backuppc list reported that
 it had a tiny limit on hardlinks which would make it seem to me like
 they don't quite understand how filesystems are supposed to work.

 The limitation was fixed in 3.7:
 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15762

 I think the btfs developers understand quite well how filesystems are
 supposed to work.  As best I understand it, the limitation was a result
 of back-references, which are an important feature to keep inodes from
 ending up as orphans.  If you're going to have an on-line fsck, that
 matters.

OK, but in my opinion it is worse if that was a design decision that
is just now being changed.  Bugs I can understand, but not choosing to
design a new filesystem with unrealistic limitations.

-- 
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  lesmikes...@gmail.com
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Leon Fauster
Am 06.03.2013 um 17:25 schrieb Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com:
 On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:00 AM, Mark Snyder
 msny...@highlandsolutions.com wrote:
 
 I've used software raid quite a bit, and have developed a few rules of 
 thumb, hope these help!
 
 Do you (or anyone...) have any rules of thumb regarding drives over
 2TB or using raid sets that were created on Centos5 under Centos6?   I


AFAIK you need to use a GPT for partitions with 2TB ...

--
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread John R Pierce
On 3/6/2013 12:22 PM, Leon Fauster wrote:
 AFAIK you need to use a GPT for partitions with 2TB ...

you need GPT to partition devices larger than 2TB, regardless of the 
parittion size.

me, I use parted

# parted /dev/sdc label gpt
# parted /dev/sdc -a none mkpart primary 512s -1s

to make a single full disk partition that starts at sector 512, which is 
256K bytes, which is usually a decent boundary for SSDs, large raids, 
and other such devices.



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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Gordon Messmer
On 03/06/2013 12:20 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
 OK, but in my opinion it is worse if that was a design decision that
 is just now being changed.  Bugs I can understand, but not choosing to
 design a new filesystem with unrealistic limitations.

It's not being changed, per se.  A reasonable means of increasing the 
number of back-references has been implemented. (again, AFAICT)
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread Les Mikesell
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:42 PM, John R Pierce pie...@hogranch.com wrote:

 AFAIK you need to use a GPT for partitions with 2TB ...

 you need GPT to partition devices larger than 2TB, regardless of the
 parittion size.

 me, I use parted

 # parted /dev/sdc label gpt
 # parted /dev/sdc -a none mkpart primary 512s -1s

 to make a single full disk partition that starts at sector 512, which is
 256K bytes, which is usually a decent boundary for SSDs, large raids,
 and other such devices.

Large drives often have 4k sectors - don't you want a 1M offset to
make sure the partition start is aligned?   Gparted seems to do that
by default.   Also, is it possible to make the raid auto-assemble at
boot like smaller ones do?I had to put an ARRAY entry into
/etc/mdadm.conf with the devices but I think someone advised doing
set partition number raid on in parted.

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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread John R Pierce
On 3/6/2013 1:12 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
 Large drives often have 4k sectors - don't you want a 1M offset to
 make sure the partition start is aligned?

256K is a multiple of 4K.   sure, you could use 2048s instead if you 
wanted 1M boundaries, its all good.



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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-06 Thread SilverTip257
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Gordon Messmer yiny...@eburg.com wrote:

 On 03/05/2013 05:58 AM, SilverTip257 wrote:
 
  Veering slightly from your original question...
  I recently set up softraid arrays by hand before invoking the Anaconda
  installer (on a 6.3 install).  Recent mdadm packages that ship with
 CentOS
  support metadata 1.1 and 1.2 (... actually defaulting to 1.2 I believe),
  but GRUB 0.97 only supports metadata 1.0 and not the metadata version
 that
  mdadm defaulted to.  On my CentOS 5 installs in the past I've
 specifically
  set --metadata=0.90 to avert any catastrophes like this.

 As far as I know, GRUB 0.97 only supports metadata 0.90, as does LILO.
 Anaconda will create arrays with 0.90 metadata for this reason.


I can tell you from my recent experience that whatever concoction of GRUB
0.97 (shipped with CentOS 6.3) supports booting off of metadata 1.0

I often encounter metadata 0.90 ... on many [all?] of the aging CentOS 5
installs I see.



 The kernel wiki disagrees with me:
 https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_superblock_formats

 Debian's documentation indicates that only grub 1.98+20100720-1 or later
 will boot from a RAID volume with a newer metadata format:


Grub 1.99 or thereabouts is pretty awesome.
Grub2 (as Debian packages it) supports booting off LVM which is slick.  Not
overly useful, but convenient if you would rather /boot be part of the
rootfs ... especially with kernels getting larger.

A /boot partition that could be 100MB with CentOS 5 now needs to be around
512MB with CentOS 6 (found this out the hard way with a development system).
Disk space is cheap ... but I still don't want to waste space!
:)



 http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#mdadm-metadata
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-05 Thread SilverTip257
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 10:53 PM, Chris Weisiger cweisi...@bellsouth.netwrote:

 I have been reading about software raid. I configured my first software
 raid system about a month ago.

 I have 4 500 Gig drives configured in RAID 5 configuration with a total of
 1.5TB.

 Currently I configured the complete individual drivers as software raid,
 then created a /dev/md0 with the drives


I've read (and would agree) that using the entire drive can hide the fact
that a softraid is there.  If you set up a partition on the disk and mark
the file system as type fd then no matter what you know that disk is part
of a softraid array.

What you configured works.  Is it wrong?  No.


 I then created a /file_storage partition on /dev/md0.

 I created my /boot / and swap partitions on a non raid drive in my system.

 Is the the proper way to configure software raid?


I generally use LVM on my systems, so my layouts has /boot carved out as
its own partition and then another partition for the LVM PV.  And if you
use standard partitions instead of LVM, then create individual softraid
arrays for each partition.
* Remember, /boot can only be on a raid1 software array.


Veering slightly from your original question...
I recently set up softraid arrays by hand before invoking the Anaconda
installer (on a 6.3 install).  Recent mdadm packages that ship with CentOS
support metadata 1.1 and 1.2 (... actually defaulting to 1.2 I believe),
but GRUB 0.97 only supports metadata 1.0 and not the metadata version that
mdadm defaulted to.  On my CentOS 5 installs in the past I've specifically
set --metadata=0.90 to avert any catastrophes like this.

Fun problem to troubleshoot ... I knew it once that system wouldn't boot
though.  Kind of odd that the installer didn't pick up on the metadata
version and flag it or modify it.  In the end I ended up rescuing the
system by backing up and recreating the /boot softraid with metadata 1.0  :)


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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-05 Thread Mark LaPierre
On 03/04/2013 10:53 PM, Chris Weisiger wrote:
 I have been reading about software raid. I configured my first software raid 
 system about a month ago.

 I have 4 500 Gig drives configured in RAID 5 configuration with a total of 
 1.5TB.

 Currently I configured the complete individual drivers as software raid, then 
 created a /dev/md0 with the drives

 I then created a /file_storage partition on /dev/md0.

 I created my /boot / and swap partitions on a non raid drive in my system.

 Is the the proper way to configure software raid?
 ___

Hey Chris,

What you have done is a totally acceptable way of building a raid array.

Software raid on Linux is amazingly flexible.  It is able to build 
arrays on individual matching drives as you have done, drives of 
different physical sizes, a combination physical drives and partitions 
on other drives, or a combination of partitions on different drives.  It 
can even build a raid array on several partitions on one physical drive, 
not that you would ever want to do that.

In other words, if you can dream it up, software raid can probably build 
it.  The question is why are you using raid at all?  If you are trying 
to increase access speed or data security then raid makes sense.  The 
appropriate configuration depends on your available resources and the 
nature of your intent.



-- 
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°v°
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Registered Linux user No #267004
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-05 Thread John R Pierce
On 3/5/2013 4:27 PM, Mark LaPierre wrote:
 The question is why are you using raid at all?

indeed.   the primary justification for the R in RAID, Redundant, is 
high availability. having the OS on a non-raid volume completely 
violates this.RAID is most definitely NOT a substitute for backups.


-- 
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somewhere on the middle of the left coast

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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-05 Thread Chris Weisiger
I essentially configured the software raid to create a home server and not have 
to worry about individual drives. I've built a collection of several several 
gigs of music and pictures. Enough to look into a raid system. Plus it is alot 
cheaper than a hardware raid setup.
Plus I want to do testing with it to possible use it for some of the clients 
that the business I work for do work for for basic file server services


-Original Message-
From: Mark LaPierre
Sent: 3/5/2013 6:27 PM
To: centos@centos.org
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

On 03/04/2013 10:53 PM, Chris Weisiger wrote:
 I have been reading about software raid. I configured my first software raid 
 system about a month ago.

 I have 4 500 Gig drives configured in RAID 5 configuration with a total of 
 1.5TB.

 Currently I configured the complete individual drivers as software raid, then 
 created a /dev/md0 with the drives

 I then created a /file_storage partition on /dev/md0.

 I created my /boot / and swap partitions on a non raid drive in my system.

 Is the the proper way to configure software raid?
 ___

Hey Chris,

What you have done is a totally acceptable way of building a raid array.

Software raid on Linux is amazingly flexible.  It is able to build 
arrays on individual matching drives as you have done, drives of 
different physical sizes, a combination physical drives and partitions 
on other drives, or a combination of partitions on different drives.  It 
can even build a raid array on several partitions on one physical drive, 
not that you would ever want to do that.

In other words, if you can dream it up, software raid can probably build 
it.  The question is why are you using raid at all?  If you are trying 
to increase access speed or data security then raid makes sense.  The 
appropriate configuration depends on your available resources and the 
nature of your intent.



-- 
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°v°
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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-05 Thread John R Pierce
On 3/5/2013 5:18 PM, Chris Weisiger wrote:
 I essentially configured the software raid to create a home server and not 
 have to worry about individual drives. I've built a collection of several 
 several gigs of music and pictures. Enough to look into a raid system. Plus 
 it is alot cheaper than a hardware raid setup.
 Plus I want to do testing with it to possible use it for some of the clients 
 that the business I work for do work for for basic file server services

I am using FreeNAS for my home fileserver, and really liking it. its a 
turnkey NAS oriented build of FreeBSD.  the OS itself boots from a 4GB 
USB stick, so ALL your disks can be in the data raid configuration (I'm 
using 4x3TB RAIDZ, which is equivalent to raid5). its entirely web managed.



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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-05 Thread Chris Weisiger
Im not so much concerned about the os not being on a raid system. I am really 
concerned about my data, music, pictures,docs, etc.
I run a minimum os centos 5.9 install anyway so it would take long to reload 
the os if i had to.

-Original Message-
From: John R Pierce
Sent: 3/5/2013 6:45 PM
To: centos@centos.org
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

On 3/5/2013 4:27 PM, Mark LaPierre wrote:
 The question is why are you using raid at all?

indeed.   the primary justification for the R in RAID, Redundant, is 
high availability. having the OS on a non-raid volume completely 
violates this.RAID is most definitely NOT a substitute for backups.


-- 
john r pierce  37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast

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Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-05 Thread Chris Weisiger
Im in the process of configuring my data to be backed up to external devices.

-Original Message-
From: John R Pierce
Sent: 3/5/2013 6:45 PM
To: centos@centos.org
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

On 3/5/2013 4:27 PM, Mark LaPierre wrote:
 The question is why are you using raid at all?

indeed.   the primary justification for the R in RAID, Redundant, is 
high availability. having the OS on a non-raid volume completely 
violates this.RAID is most definitely NOT a substitute for backups.


-- 
john r pierce  37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast

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[CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

2013-03-04 Thread Chris Weisiger
I have been reading about software raid. I configured my first software raid 
system about a month ago.

I have 4 500 Gig drives configured in RAID 5 configuration with a total of 
1.5TB.

Currently I configured the complete individual drivers as software raid, then 
created a /dev/md0 with the drives

I then created a /file_storage partition on /dev/md0.

I created my /boot / and swap partitions on a non raid drive in my system.

Is the the proper way to configure software raid?
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