Hi all, I'm intending to setup RAID on my home workstation for the first time ever tonight. It will be a fresh install on a pair of 160GB SATA drives. I have a couple of questions for the RAID gurus out there.
I've got CDs for Mandrake 9.2 and Fedora Core 1 -- are either of these two easier from the perspective of setting up RAID at install time? I've heard that FC1 does this. I have no idea if the Mandrake installer does, though the docs on diskdrake claim that it does have RAID support. I'll look into the details if it turns out I'm forced to do this, but I'd like to know in advance how hard it is to turn a standard single-drive install into a RAID system. Any ideas? I assume this involves running one of the drives in failed state or similar. What's the deal with swap? I'd prefer for a failed drive not to take my machine down, and swap is a potential problem there, though I could probably accept it killing processes that happen to be swapped out. Is Linux's (I'll be running a 2.6 kernel just as soon as I've got everything setup) swap support smart enough to detect dead drives and kill processes swapped on those drives, or will have to do RAID swap as well? Finally, my motherboard (an Abit IIRC) claims to have an on-board Highpoint hardware RAID controller. Is there any compelling reason to use this vs software RAID? Is the RAID on-disk format standardised between controllers? (ie if I do use hardware RAID, will I have issues moving these drives to another computer?) Many thanks, James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
