I'm about to install 8.1 on a SCSI-only system. While waiting for the UPS guy to deliver the 4.6lb box, I was wondering, can I put the whole thing on a 4x18GB drive RAID5 device - including booting from the RAID device? After reading what I have on RAID on my 7.3 system + the software RAID howto online at... http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html ... I'm thinking I'll try making an autoboot array with a file for swap and see how that works. Does that sound like a workable plan, or would performance be better with a small chunk of each drive partitioned as swap? If I go with partitions, won't the system go down if any drive breaks? From what I read, if the swap is on a file in the array then I should get the same sort of striping boost AND protection against any one drive going out - though at a cost of having to calculate the parity on every write. (Right? I'm new to RAIDing so please tell me if I'm full of sh**.) I have enough memory that my system rarely swaps though, so I'm not sure if that's a big deal for me. How should I deal with booting and installing 8.1? Does the SuSE install process support installing to a bootable RAID or should I take advantage of my working 7.3 to do some pre-configuration of the RAID/drives and then mount it "by hand" at install time? Is this sort of thing even supported by the SuSE kernel and boot DVD? If not I suppose I could make a small "boot" partition on one of the drives if I needed to. However, wouldn't the other drives then have a similarly-sized chunk of wasted space? Finally, what about running a journaling FS on top of the RAID? The RAID will be 54GB.. big enough that I don't want to sit through too many fscks. Is this possible? If so, Linux seems to have a number of options here. Any recommendation on which is best? If I make it this far, will this be the straw that breaks the camel's back? ;) How (un?)stable is all this likely to be? I do have a good backup habit, but I'd rather not have to rely on it any more than I have to. TIA, -John