2009/4/15 Matt Lawrence <[email protected]>: > > > Well, that's not quite the same as grub being able to actually speak RAID, > but it is useful if you can afford to dedicate the space. Typically I want > my drives in a RAD6 and would prefer not to carve off a chunk of all the > drives to use as a RAID1. For typical 1U servers, then RAID1 is the way to > go, there's often only two drives available. > I politely disagree. We always built cluster head nodes with a mirrored disk pair for the systems disk, and a RAID 5 or 6 set with the rest of the disks in the chassis. If possible, you want a sensibly sized disk for your system disk - IMHO running terabyte-sized SATA drives as the OS drives on a system is inviting trouble. Get something small enough that you can readily back it up, and make sure it is mirrored. Then let the big data store look after itself - format it with XFS, run LVM on it, run RAID 6 on it. And if the worst happens and you lose your system disks, or indeed more likely you want to do a systems update, you UNLATCH A DRIVE AND PUT IT ON THE SHELF. Then you merrily update/patch/generally fool with the other drive (plus a replacement spare) and you have an instant fallback plan if things go pear-shaped. Sorry - I just don't buy having a RAID6 across all disks in one chassis. Unless you are booting over a SAN or something.
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