On 9/13/2011 6:13 PM, George OLson wrote:
I am about to set up RAID-1 on my system, and I am looking for some experienced opinions.
Here is my situation. I only need a mirror image drive to protect my data against drive failure, so RAID-1 is the route I would like to take. I don't want to have to reinstall my OS, as I have a ton of things installed and configured now that is exactly how I want it.
My original drive is a 500GB, partitioned like so:
/dev/sda1 2048 4208639 2103296 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda2 * 4208640 46153727 20972544 83 Linux /dev/sda3 46153728 976773119 465309696 83 Linux
I have recently purchased a 1TB drive to use as the mirror image, with the intent that the 2nd 500GB on this drive will be used for other purposes, like maybe testing a new installation when it comes out, or just having extra data that I don't need on the mirror image partition. I have installed the 1TB drive and hooked it up. It is not yet partitioned.
I have done some research on the internet, and I found some tech sites that said that using the RAID setup in the BIOS is easy to set up, and you can do it without having to reinstall your OS. However, other sites have said that you do have to reinstall your OS, as it will wipe the original drive. (In any case, it would have been easier if I had set up RAID before the initial install, but too late now.)
My BIOS setup only has 1 line indicating RAID, in the "IDE setup" menu, where it allows you to configure nVidia RAID as enabled or disabled. The motherboard user guide (it is an ASUS M2N68-AM SE2) doesn't give any other information.
If I put the RAID setting to enabled, and then on my next subsequent reboot, will the BIOS would run me through a setup utility to setup RAID? If I knew for sure that it wouldn't wipe my original hard drive, I would tend to go that way, as it seems simpler. This website, "http://lifehacker.com/352472/set-up-real+time-bulletproof-backup-drive-redun...", indicated a very simple setup, but that is only 1 guy so I am skeptical if it is really as simple as he makes it out to be.
So for you all that have experience in this, do most/all BIOS setups that support RAID allow for setting up RAID after the OS is already installed on the first drive?
I know that some of you probably prefer software RAID, and I see that Yast has a partitioner and the means to setup linux software RAID.
If you are a software RAID advocate, what would be the advantages to me of using software RAID over BIOS RAID?
With software raid you can apply raid after the fact. Yast does this for you. I had to do this, (back in 11.0 I believe) where I had a data partition on a single drive, and decided to add another for raid 1. I built the array in yast just to see if it could be done. (all my prior setups were done with Madm at the command line). I told yast that the second drive was a hot spare, and that the array was running degraded. It rebuilt it as soon as it fired up. Oh, and yes, I DID take a backup before setting this up, and so should you, but then you know this, anyone careful enough to be setting up raid knows this. At one time there was a problem having /boot on raid, and its been a while since I had to reconfigure a fresh box, so I don't know if this is still the case. -- _____________________________________ ---This space for rent--- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org