i just bought a motherboard with onboard SATA RAID and two SATA hard drives for my linux box before i realized that you can't utilize the onboard RAID controller when installing linux. so i'm left with linux's software RAID option. i've seen two software RAID setups and i'd like to ask your opinion on them: given identical hard drives: /dev/sd0 and /dev/sd1 first method: * create swap partition on /dev/sd0 * create boot partition of exactly the same size as the swap on /dev/sd1 * create a software RAID partition on both /dev/sd0 and /dev/sd1 taking up the remainder of the drives * create a RAID-0 device using those two software RAID partitions without mount point / second method: * create /boot partition on /dev/sd0 * create /dummy partition on /dev/sd1 that is exactly the same size as /boot * create a software RAID partition on both /dev/sd0 and /dev/sd1 taking up the remainder of the drives * create an LVM device using the two RAID partitions * create swap and / on the LVM the first method is simpler, but has the disadvantages of having a needlessly large /boot partition and also not having swap on the RAID. are there any disadvantages to doing it the LVM way? am i even using the LVM correctly in the second method? hell i don't even really know what an LVM is, all i know is that it allows me to make multiple partitions on a software RAID-0 device. thanks for the advice.
