On Sun, 28 May 2000, David Francis wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have just set up a new web server with two drives each configured with
> four identical partitions. The three "non-swap" partitions are all set up
> as RAID level 1 mirrors. Everything is up and running fine.
>
> md0 = /
> md1 = /home
> md2 = /usr
>
> I physically removed each of the drives at different times and was very
> happy to see that each one booted and ran fine individually. This was my
> goal. I like this apparent level of fault tolerance. However, I am
> concerned about the performance hit.
>
Take a look at http://www.icon.fi/~mak/ there is a readbalance patch
which should increase the performance. Reading from a raid 1 should
always be faster, so this is good for /usr and /. Writting can be slightly
slower.
> After doing more reading and lurking on this maillist, I'm starting to get
> the idea that having the /root or /boot partition on a RAID is not
> advisable. Some older FAQs say that you can't upgrade the kernel with this
> configuration. Is that still true? I would like to understand better why
> this not an advisable configuration.
>
To me this is a very advisable configuration. It gives you fault tolerance
and more speed. In the days where there was no autodetection it was more
complicated to have a root raid. Upgrading the kernel is also no problem,
just make shure that the kernel contains the raid patches.
Holger
