I'm thinking of setting up my first RAID 10 server, built from commodity hardware + software RAID controller.
My main requirements for the server is FAST WRITE/READs + resilience in the face of a disk failure (probability of more than one disk failing simultaneously is too low to be of concern in my use case).
I am thinking of using a configuration of striping a mirror set (my preferred method due to resiliency), i.e., first creating two mirror sets and then creating a stripe set from the two mirrors (minimum four drives)
Now, I haven't actually used a RAID system before – and all the documentation seems to be talking about data storage, so (although it may seem a silly question), I'm wondering whether from a user's point of view, if there's something different I need to do – during my daily ops.
I mean, is the raid drive presented to me (at the console for instance), as a single mapped drive?
Question 1
Given a brand new server machine (built from commodity components)+ 4 SATA drives and an Ubuntu installation disk, what are the steps to turn this into a server with RAID 10 storage?
Question 2
Do I have to do anything differently (i.e. different to how I install on my desktop Ubuntu machine), to install programs such as python, django, postgresql etc on this new server machine?
Best Answer
Setting up software RAID in Ubuntu is super simple.
Answer 1: Frankly, read the manual... I promise if you can navigate Ubuntu at all, you can setup a software RAID. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Raid
Answer 2: Once the RAID is configured, it is mounted just as any physical drive would be. (as the manual will also show)
One thing I would recommend once you have a handle on the RAID configuration is looking into setting up an SSD for caching. SSD caching can add an additional boost to the performance of you array.