Linux – RAID configuration on ICH9R with 3xHDD for Windows and Linux

fakeraidlinuxraidsoftware-raidwindows

I have a MSI P35 Neo2-FIR Motherboard with ICH9R raid chipset. It's not a true hardware RAID solution, it requires software addon to work properly.
There are drivers for Windows and dmraid/fakeraid for Linux.

I have 3 identical HDDs (ST3250410AS 250GB) for usage. I need 1 partition with data accessible from Windows and Linux (this one MUST be on RAID) and at least two for systems.

What disc/raid layout should I use? Protection of data (/home and "Document and Settings") is the most important

Best Answer

If you only have 3 hard drives, your options are:

  • Two drives in a raid 1 mirror, plus one extra drive. You can use the extra drive for backup archives so that if you delete a file, you can restore it from the backup.
  • Two drives in a raid 0 stripe, plus one extra drive - the raid 0 will have no redundancy, so that's a dangerous option.
  • Three drives in a raid 0 stripe - no redundancy, so that's dangerous
  • Three drives in a raid 5 stripe - redundancy, but not too fast in terms of writes

If you could go up to 4 drives, then you can have one big raid 10 (or 0+1 stripe) that will give you fast reads/writes, plus redundancy across the whole thing. That'll make the most sense from an ease-of-management perspective.

The wikipedia article on RAID levels is actually quite good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

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