[lug] RAID under Linux

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 10:47:55PM +0100, rm at mamma.varadinet.de wrote:
>On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 02:38:58PM -0700, J. Wayde Allen wrote:
>> Has anyone tried using software RAID under Linux?  If so, how well does
>> this work?

Yes, I've done some fairly heavy testing and have been happy with it.
Happier than with the Mylex RAID controllers, it's safe to say.  We've got
a few machines running RAID-1, and one with 4 37GB IDE drives running
RAID-5, and they've all been very reliable.

If you install RedHat/KRUD in GUI mode, there's an option to set up RAID
from the partitioning screen, and it will even set up LILO mirrored on all
your boot drives...

One of the systems I set up was using RAID-1 mirroring, and I broke the
mirror and ran "badblocks -w" on one disc, then re-synced the mirrors and
broke them again and did it on the other drive.  Worked great...

>a cheap way to get it. It won't help you at all for uptime since
>IDE normally isn't hot-pluggable.

Well, even if you put the drives in a hot-pluggable chassis, Linux is VERY
unhappy if you pull an IDE drive without rebooting.  Is there a way to say
"Hey, this drive is about to be pulled" with IDE?

Sean
-- 
 Some girl with psychic power, She said "T-bone, what's your sign?"
 I blinked and answered "Neon", I thought I'd blow her mind.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python