[lug] 5 Jan installfest.

[David L. Anselmi]

Adams, Scott (FGWA-CO) wrote:
> My intent is to get more 300g hard drives as money becomes available. I
> have 4 9gig drives but I want the larger size. Would it be better to
> learn on the 9gig drives and then repeat the whole process when I get
> atleast one more 300 or to put the 300 in now and get the redundancy
> when I can add the other drives? In otherwords can I set up the RAID
> with only 1 drive in? 

You won't want to set up one drive and multiple partitions expecting to 
add another drive later.  If you use your one drive to experiment with 
you'd want to wipe it before going live.  The RAID will be simpler if 
you build it with drives containing only one partition.  I prefer to put 
LVM on top of RAID to handle partitioning but I'm sure others don't.

You can set up the one drive as half a mirror and add the second drive 
later, but only if you're shooting for RAID 1, 01, or 10 in the end.

If you're the type to document what you do thoroughly (especially if you 
script it as you go) then using the 4 drives you have would be useful. 
Or if you want to do some benchmarking with different RAID levels.

If you just want to fiddle around to see that it works then the drive 
you have is fine for that.  I assume you won't be installing on top of 
the RAID.

Dave