John J. Trammell wrote: > On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 05:17:53PM -0600, Josh Trutwin wrote: >> 1.) Does anyone have experiences they can share with setting up a s/w >> RAID on an existing system? (Server is a Dell PowerEdge 1750 running >> Debian sid with 2.4.32 - I build the kernel myself - it is currently >> co-located which might make remote setup interesting) > > I set up a software RAID system on my home server a couple of years ago > (back when two 40GB drives were all my I could afford). I bought a PCI > IDE controller and two identical drives, installed and formatted them, > took about 45 minutes total. The instructions in the RAID HOWTO were > pretty good as I recall. Thanks - I had some other off-list replies too which have been helpful. I guess my biggest concern now is how to create a RAID starting with an existing system. Do I have to partition the second drive the same as my current one? I'm still reading up on a lot of this so I'm still weeks (maybe months?) from going forward. > I haven't had any problems with it since I've set it up, so I can't > speak to how difficult it is to recover from e.g. a disk failure. It's > a RAID-1 setup. I guess it doesn't take the place of a good backup strategy, but as I see it with a RAID-1 setup if one of the drives goes bad you should be able to use the other drive while you replace the faulty one. I think that's a bit of an oversimplification though. Thanks, Josh