Mike Coan wrote: > On Friday 19 October 2007 02:07:49 pm Richard Creighton wrote: > > Richard, > > Thanks so much for your persistence. I did in fact try it in two stages, > No problem ... glad it worked out
> raid 5 array that SMART finally indicated the drive was bad. > A long time ago I learned to test the pieces when there was doubt. That was the idea behind the do it in stages and format drives conventionally before creating arrays when in doubt. > Although time consuming, the exercise was helpful to me. From your YAST > screen shot I realized that one didn't need to use the entire disk for an > array, just equal size partitions. i had been under the impression you had to > use the whole drive. In ideal situations, one would create arrays of DRIVES which when failures occurred, if you had hot-swappable hardware, it makes it simple to use entire drives. In home or SOHO environments, it isn't written in stone that you have to do that. It is just that if a drive fails, you will have multiple arrays that need to be rebuilt concurrently, which is certainly possible, albeit, time-consuming. > Thus I will format things differently. Linux does the > file serving, but we have one major application that must be run on a Windows > server. I run it as a virtual machine using vmware. Since raid 0 is the > fastest, I will create a raid0 array for virtual machines. Then two raid5 > arrays for / and for /storage. I back up to storage and to an external usb > drive. > > I suggest that you reconsider the RAID 0 idea. While it is possible it is faster, the primary reason for RAID in the first place is redundancy. You get none with RAID 0. If a drive fails with RAID 0, you lose everything. Consider RAID 1 or better yet, seeing as you are going to use VMWare or other virfual machine engine, just create the virtual drive within one of the raid 5 partitions and you have that redundancy and very little loss of speed. In fact, I think RAID 5 might be as fast as RAID 0, it just has some space overhead to get the robustness you need. I only use RAID 0 when space is more important than redundancy. > Thanks again for all your help. Sorry it was a hardware problem, but since > SMART indicated no problem, i wasn't sure. There must be a way to test > drives to make sure they are good before beginning aninstallation. > > Mike > > There probably is, and when you find it, share it with me....and the rest of us <grin> Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
