First of all, I believe soft raid docs demonstrate making arrays of partitions instead of arrays of block devices, simply because it is possible... Hw raid only does arrays of full drives.
Personally I don't use partitioning at all. My largest RAID 5 array is 9TB. I use hardware RAID, so the devices were added in full (ie /dev/sda not /dev/sda1) when I did the assembly. Then I formatted the array as an ext3 filesystem. No partition table there as well. If you wish to partition your array you need to use GPT (above 2TB), hence parted (AFAIK), and possibly some magic parameters to cope with 4K sector drives. But why partition when the volume will only contain data ? I can understand the interest of a hard limit for /tmp, /home or swap space; but for data I fail to see it. So I use a few top-level directories on the array, and use bind mounts to attach them were needed. I can use quotas to enforce limits if needed. Anyway I would probably not use RAID either for an archive. If you intended to partition 6TB, maybe you can live with independent 2TB or 3TB drives ? That would bring you closer to archiving than using RAID. I have 2 home servers "in production" that use a bunch of drives and a unioning filesystem overlay giving the illusion of a large volume. One of the server has 8 data drives, the other has only 4. In read (or delete) access this works perfectly. When a drive dies, some files disappear, that's all. In create (write) access it doesn't work as well, so you're better off creating files on the drives independently. If you intend to do NFS exports on the virtual volume, testing is in order. I've been using mhddfs, a FUSE driver (simple and straight), and aufs, a linux kernel module (ambitious and quirky.) -- epoch1970 Daily dose delivered by: 2 SB Classic (fw 130), 1 SB Boom (fw 50) SqueezeCenter 7.3.4 (Debian 5.0) with plugins: ContextMenu, SaverSwitcher by Peter Watkins Server Power Control by Gordon Harris WeatherTime by Martin Rehfeld IRBlaster by Gwendesign (Felix) FindArt, CDplayer by bpa BBC iPlayer, SwitchPlayer by Triode PowerSave by Jason Holtzapple TrackStat by Erland Isaksson. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ epoch1970's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16711 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84125
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