Ubuntu – How to setup /home over software RAID under Ubuntu 10.10

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I have 3 hds, one of 500G which I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on, and two of 1TB each which I'd like build a RAID 0 volume on. My question are:

1) What are the pros and cons of using my motherboard RAID or Linux Software RAID?

2) How do I safely mount /home on that RAID volume?

Best Answer

Linux software RAID is pretty good. If you have a high-end motherboard the hardware RAID me be faster, but the software RAID is going to be a lot more flexible, and you'll have all the tools for configuring it at your fingertips without having to boot into BIOS.

See the mdadm man page and the various documentation here.

How do I safely mount /home on that RAID volume?

I'm not sure what you're asking here...mounting a RAID device is just like mounting any other device; you put an entry in your /etc/fstab file and the system will mount it automatically when it boots. RAID devices are typically named /dev/md0, /dev/md1, and so forth, so your fstab might have an entry like this:

/dev/md0         /home            ext4    defaults              0       1

Related Solutions

Linux – LVM on RAID vs RAID on LVM: Which Is Better?

Your current setup is like this:

| / | /var | /usr | /home  |
 --------------------------
|       LVM Volume         |
 --------------------------
|       RAID Volume        |
 --------------------------
| Disk 1 | Disk 2 | Disk 3 |

It's a much simpler setup with more flexibility. You can use all of the disks in the RAID volume and slice and dice them whatever way you like with LVM. The other way isn't even worth thinking about - it's ridiculously complicated and you lose the benefits of LVM at the filesystem level.

If you tried to RAID LVM volumes, you would be left with a normal device without any of the LVM volume benefits (e.g. growing filesystems etc.)

Linux – LVM over Raid 1 with different size disks in Ubuntu

You can create several partitions on your first array. E.g. one for a system partition, one for a swap partition etc. and one partition for the LVM on the first array. On the second one you can create one big LVM partition or take the whole drive as a physical volume. Both LVM partitions (physical volumes) can then be combined into one LVM volume group.

The system partition is not affected by the LVM. I don't know much about software RAID configuration and how to boot from it. But the LVM is not a problem in that context because your system is on a normal partition.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – LVM on RAID vs RAID on LVM: Which Is Better?

Linux – LVM over Raid 1 with different size disks in Ubuntu

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