Calling all Linux power users - I need a new partition table

mrscruffy

Seeing as there are numerous Linux users here (:p) I've got a question following a hard drive failure earlier this evening.

***WARNING*** - This post gets very geeky very quickly. If you get scared easily look away now.

As I have encountered a disk failure I might take the opportunity for some tinkering whilst I'm inside the beige box!

My current set-up is:
2 x 40GB SATA drives with 3 partitions (one of these just died!)
2 x 500GB SATA drives with 1 partition

The 40GB drives have 3 x software RAID-1 drives mapped to them for /boot, / and /swap. The 500GB drives has a single RAID-1 mapped to /home

This was great as I had some back luck with drive failures previously and wanted redundancy over performance. Now that one of the 40GB drives has failed I am considering spashing out 2 more 500GB drives and get the performance that RAID-5 can offer.

I know there are many, many, many forum posts on how to create a RAID but that is not really my question. What I not sure about is how to get extra performance without loosing redundancy.

As shown above I have /home nice and safe on its own pair of mirrored drives which has been useful as I recently decided to do a clean install and only made changes to / on the other pair of drives.

I could buy 2 more 500GB drives and get a nice quick RAID-5 (I've only got 4 SATA connections). But then I have to have / and /home on the same set of drives - Is this sensible?

Is it just as simple as creating 4 partitions across 4 drives and mapping each to a RAID-5 one each for /boot, /, /swap and /home? I have a nagging in the back of my head which think so but it is always nice to check!

Many thanks

tronator

mrscruffy wrote: »

I could buy 2 more 500GB drives and get a nice quick RAID-5 (I've only got 4 SATA connections). But then I have to have / and /home on the same set of drives - Is this sensible?

I don't see any problems with it as long as you don't tell us what your PC is used for. I don't think you will feel a difference in terms of speed if you use it only as a desktop.

mrscruffy

tronator wrote: »

you don't tell us what your PC is used for.

No huge processing tasks required.

Just internet, email, office, software dev. No huge I/O operations going on.

S0litaire

How much RAM have you in the box?

If you've for 4Gb+ then SWAP won't be touched that much, unless you get into Video / Graphics editing.

Here's an Idea!!
You could pick up a cheap CF adapter that plugs into the Motherboard (IDE or PCIe) and use a cheap 4Gb CF card as swap file (it'll hardly get used so will last ages)

I'd not bother sticking "/boot" or "/" on a raid setup since all your configs are in /home. It's a trivial matter to reinstall the OS if things get messed up. (but you should STILL backup your system, Raid is for speed and to guard against hardware failures not for software problems!!)

mrscruffy

S0litaire wrote: »

How much RAM have you in the box?

4GB - Hardly gets touched as you predicted.

S0litaire wrote: »

but you should STILL backup your system

I have an external 500GB drive and remote online storage. Cron ensure things keep up-to-date.

S0litaire wrote: »

all your configs are in /home

I do have a few specalised software requirements (subversion, mysql, httpd, etc.) which are on / but could be sym linked to /home

S0litaire

ok
i'd leave those where they are then lol!