Re: Raid one

Les Mikesell wrote:

Karl Larsen wrote:

RAID is generally used because of a need, rather than simply because you

can do it.  Of course, if you're doing this as a learning exercise,
that's another matter.

Some benefits of RAID, depending on the type, *can* be faster access to
data spread over more than one drive (though your current system might
be more than fast enough, making this pointless), or having a spare
drive that *can* let you keep on working when one drive has failed

(mirroring - useful for servers, probably less important for stand alone

client machines in the home), or increased storage space by using an
array of drives as if they were one big one (which can also be done
using LVM).

No my need is to have a backup in case this hard drive quits working. I can do this with rsync. But I am getting the data needed to make a raid-1 and it would be fun to make one just for the experience :-)

Disk failure is the most likely thing to go wrong, just not the only thing so you still need some other kind of backups. Raid has the advantage that you can recover more quickly if you go down at all (IDE drive failures often hang the computer until you remove them) and you don't lose the data past the last backup run. Disks are pretty cheap these days and they fail unpredictably about like light bulbs. If you want to make things slightly easier, set up a machine with 3 or 4 disks and don't bother with raid on the system portion which you can easily re-install. Just add a pair of drives with one big parition in a raid1 configuration and move your /home to it - or set it up that way during the install. Then you just have to save or remember any special configurations in /etc and keep your important work under /home.

   Still it is a worry. But I see how to do it. Now to write it down :-D



--

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.