FYI, you can use the md raid10 driver with as few as two drives, and it doesn't have to be an even multiple of drives--3 will work (although with 3 you could still only lose at most one drive of course--but rebuild speed would be much faster than for raid5 since you only have to read half as much data to reconstruct the missing disk--one full disk's worth rather than both remaining disks entirely). The layout you get with 3 drives and md raid10 driver is a.k.a. raid 1e.
For the case of two disks, a near layout will be equivalent to a raid1 layout--but you should be able to get near raid0 read performance. These may be helpful: http://www.ilsistemista.net/index.php/linux-a-unix/35-linux-software-raid-10-layouts-performance-near-far-and-offset-benchmark-analysis.html?start=1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
