I though you can have up to 255 partitions/drive. The partitions would be in a RAID array so I wouldn't have to deal with them directly anyway.
On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 3:20 PM, Xav' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wednesday 27 August 2008 21:00:11 Benoit St-Pierre, you wrote : > > > I'm in the planning stages of setting up a file server and am considering > > using RAID. > > > > My concern is that my drive sizes are mixed. I have two 500GB SATA > drives, > > a 320GB IDE and a 250GB IDE. > > > > I would like to set these up so that the maximum amount of disk space is > > usable, but still be able to recover from any one drive failing. I would > > also like to be able to add drives of any size as easily as possible. > > > > Is it possible to split each disk into a bunch of 10GB partitions, giving > > me 157 partitions in total, and specifying that I want to have 50 > > partitions worth of parity info so that if any 50 partitions go bad (ie: > > one of the 500GB disks) the RAID can recover? Adding/replacing would be > > simple if I can change the amount of parity info to keep, but I don't > know > > if this is actually possible. It looks as though spares need to be > > explicitly given so, if a disk with lots of spares goes down, it's not > > going to work. > > AFAIK, it's not possible to have so much partitions under linux, but i > can't > remember the maximum of supported partitions... but good luck to manage a > so > wide number of partitions ! > > > Another option I see is if I create 4x 250GB partitions (one on each > drive) > > in one RAID5 array, 3x 70GB partitions (on the 3 larger drives) in > another > > RAID5 array, and two 120GB in a RAID1 array. The RAID1 array reduces my > > total available disk space a bit, which is less than ideal and > > adding/replacing disks would be more of a headache. > > IMHO, i think this could be a solution. This is possible using software > RAID as > it's in the kernel, and then reassemble created raid partitions in one LVM > volume group, so you can use partitions of any space ! > > > I remember reading something about using LVM and RAID to achieve this, > but > > everything I've found has been for identical drives. > > > > Any suggestions? > > HTH. > > Xavier Parizet > > >
