Posted: 11/27/2004 7:32:13 AM EDT
| How hard is it to do? I'm building a 900gig 4 drive Raid level 5 array(more room for pr0n), and cant really justify the added expense of a $300 3ware sata RAID card. I've never done software raid in 'nix. The new fileserver will probably be running debian or whitebox |
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Very easy. Search for the Linux RAID howto. I recently upgraded our home array to 1.1T with a similar setup - 4x250 SATA IDE sw RAID 5'd together + 1 160G ATA133 then mashed together via LVM. It works well, and if I lose any of the drives I can yank them without losing data. Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/storageraid/sataRaid5 ext3 1.1T 382G 690G 36% /sata-raid5 Now I just need to find more stuff to fill it up with. :) Doc |
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980G of it is the 4x250 (remember the labels on the drives are in 1000's and the actual byte sizes are measured in 1024's ... ) and then the 160G added via LVM. Raid doesn't have much, if any, overhead on the drive. All the calculations are done in memory. The parity striping is pretty small, IIRC. I think the only real overhead was something like 50M on a 1.1T drive. It's all added in the beginning when the filesystem is formatted. Not that I'm advocating piracy on a public forum  but you might want to consider investing in a DVDR ....Doc |