Hi Tomislav I agree with what Skylar wrote. However, ask yourself what are you going to do with the cluster? For example, I am doing quite a lot of molecular modelling, which requires plenty of RAM and also scratch space. So for the machines at the old University, I set up /boot and / as RAID1. Why? Failover is the answere. In case one disc dies, I have degraded, but working machine and the next possible time I can sort out the broken hdd. Actually, I had to do that a few times as somehow the IDE hdd seem to be a bit dogdy and broke quickly. Fortunately, within one day everything was back in working order (I swapped both discs in that occassion, so I had to mirror twice). There is a HowTo setup a failover boot as well. ( http://www200.pair.com/mecham/raid/raid1.html )
Also, if what you are doing needs plenty of scratch space, I would recommend a RAID0 and xfs. Best to do that as a hardware raid as it is faster than a software raid. I hope that helps a bit. All the best Jörg Am Samstag 03 Oktober 2009 schrieb beowulf-requ...@beowulf.org: > Message: 2 > Date: Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:41:28 +0200 > From: Tomislav Maric <tomislav.ma...@gmx.com> > Subject: [Beowulf] RAID for home beowulf > To: beowulf@beowulf.org > Message-ID: <4ac78cc8.5060...@gmx.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > Hi everyone, > > I've finally gathered all the hardware I need for my home beowulf. I'm > thinking of setting up RAID 5 for the /home partition (that's where my > simulation data will be and RAID 1 for the system / partitions without > the /boot. > > 1) Does this sound reasonable? > 2) I want to put the /home at the beginning of the disks go get faster > write/seek speeds, if the partitions are the same, software RAID doesn't > care where they are? > 3) I'll leave the /boot partition on one of the 3 disks and it will NOT > be included in the RAID array, is this ok? > 4) I've read about setting up parallel swaping via priority given to > swap partitions in fstab, but also how it would be ok to create RAID 1 > array of swap partitions for the HA of the cluster. What should I choose? > > I've gone through all the software raid how-tos, FAQs and similar, but > they are not quite new (date at least 3 years) and there's no reference > to clusters. Any pointers regarding this? > > Thank you in advance, > Tomislav > > I'm starting with this: > > 3 x Asus P5Q-VM motherboards > 2 x Intel Quad Core Q8200 2.33GHz (2 nodes with 4 cores) > 1 x Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 2.6GHz (master node) > 3 x Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA 2 HDDs > > gigabyte Eth switch with 8 ports .... etc ... > > Best regards, > Tomislav -- ************************************************************* Jörg Saßmannshausen Research Fellow University of Strathclyde Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry 295 Cathedral St. Glasgow G1 1XL email: jorg.sassmannshau...@strath.ac.uk web: http://sassy.formativ.net Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
