On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 12:48:59PM -0500, David Blevins wrote: > If you are just going to use the extra 40gb for on-disk backups, I'd > say forget the RAID-5 and do a RAID-1 with the two 40gb drives. Absolutely. To expand upon that suggestion: IDE Channel 1: 40GB Master, 20GB Slave IDE Channel 2: 40GB Master, Other Slave Mirror the two 40GB drives as masters on separate channels. You may want a small partition on each disk for the initial root, otherwise use the 'fd' partition type for "Linux RAID Autodetect". I would then partition out the RAID device using LVM. Create one volume group for the RAID array, and then dole out Logical volumes for your functional partitions: /usr, /var, /opt, /home. Use your 20GB drive as your scratch drive. For processes that have lots of write operations, a mirrored RAID array will slow you down. You can use the unmirrored disk for things like program compilations or file processing. Use it for an alternative /tmp directory; point your Netscape/Mozilla temp-files cache there; etc. To get the most out of your scratch partitions, I wouldn't even bother with journaled filesystems. Although reiserfs is pretty fast, you could probably get by with an ext2 filesystem w/no reserve blockes for the super-user: # pvcreate /dev/hdb # vgscan; vgcreate --autobackup y vg_scratch /dev/hdb # lvcreate --autobackup y --name lv_scratch --size 20g vg_scratch # mkfs.ext2 -L scratch -m 0 /dev/vg_scratch/lv_scratch # echo "/dev/vg_scratch/lv_scratch /scratch auto defaults 0 2" >> \ /dev/fstab # mkdir /scratch; mount /scratch The scratch drive may also be a good place to put your swap, but remember, if the scratch drive crashes, your kernel may panic. Have fun. ;-) -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 240 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20030704/daaa6065/attachment.pgp