Ron Johnson said: > Hmmm. By definition, RAID1 is "mirroring". Never heard of putting any > more than 2 disks in a mirrorset. Never even thought of it, > actually. With more than 2 disks, I'd automatically go with RAID5.
in many cases I would too. However, most implimentations of LILO and or GRUB cannot boot from a software raid 5 array. A lot of systems I have worked with[1] usually only have enough space for 2 or 3 properly cooled drives(you could fit a 4th, but usually in a spot where it does not have active cooling). As a result I like to use PC Power & Cooling's Bay Cool III. Takes 2 5.25" drive bays, and can fit 3 disks in there. Has 1 real big powerful fan in front of all 3 disks(more reliable then those tiny ones), and a nice removable filter(I'm a big fan of having a LOT of active cooling) On such systems I usually go with 2 disk raid 1 with a hot spare for maximum reliablity. Since there is no room for a 4th disk for a boot device and the Debian version of LILO/grub doesn't appear to support booting from raid 5 last I checked, raid 1 is the only option. I don't want to waste a drive, so I make the 3rd disk hot spare. If the system has a 3rd 5.25" bay it usually gets the CDROM. Otherwise I use an external SCSI cdrom for any cdrom needs. Somehow SuSE has a version of LILO/GRUB that can boot a raid 5 volume without any trouble(same configuration as above, 3 disks and one raid 5 array). Not sure how they do it. When I tried it on debian LILO refused to even load in the MBR, saying something like 'lilo only supports root on raid 1' or something. nate [1] http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/rackmount.jpg <- example of such system. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
