I have three identical Western Digital internal drives. I am getting ready to create a basic home server to keep all my files and data safe. The only thing I care about is that I have a /home directory or some kind of directory with lots of disk space and is in a RAID mirror for all my files.

How do I configure the three identical sized drives in order to create a file server? I don't know what the right way is to partition the drives.

on this machine I normally just do:

swap = 1024 MB
/boot = 1024 MB

Everything else as /.

Generally you have to either have a raid-controller (h/w) or your need to use a s/w level raid usually integrated with a volume manager as it is done with OpenSUSE 11.1 etc.

I have Raid 5 for full recovery. My experiences have been forget the s/w raid implementation because on the first sign of memory hich-ups or problems your doing to corrupt your raid drives and most likely you will NOT be able to recover from this situation.

If you really want a stable and recoverable RAID (5 or 6) you will need a h/w raid controller (I use 3ware 9550SX style h.w - your selection of h/w may differ). For raid5 you need four identical drives where you end up with the space of three, for raid6 you need five drives minimum and get the space of only three drives again. That is the cost of reliability and recoverablility. On the file system side, I would strongly suggest that you use XFS for the large disk area as it is the best for storing, replaying, writing largest file like movies etc.

SO, if your still wanting to go the s/w way, well read the doco from OpenSuSE 11.1 (or there web site) and it will show you the way. Accually, your probably best going with this flavour of Linux, if you want it to do it all for you.

Hope this assists.
Cheers. WP

Most people agree that the software version of the linux raid (mdadm) has many advantages over any hardware version. You only need 3 drives for raid 5.

To the op, just search for "mdadm" over here http://www.howtoforge.com/
That would be a good place to start

I would strongly recommend using software RAID if you're only going to be using it for home use. There probably isn't going to be any reliability difference if you use an affordable hardware RAID card and you will be severely limited by the functionality of an affordable hardware RAID card. I've been using OpenSUSE for software RAID for a couple of weeks now and I love it. There are some many cool things that can be done with OpenSUSE and software RAID. Firstly, you can expand RAID 5 or 6 arrays using the grow function. RAID arrays can be wrapped with LVM to allow different RAID arrays to function as one large array. For example, I have three 500GB drives in a RAID 5 and I'm going to make a RAID 1 array out of two 250GB drives. With LVM I can combine my RAID 5 and RAID 1 array and have them appear and function as one large array. This is very nice for home users as they will typically upgrade is small increments. Another cool feature is the ability to use SAMBA to share files with Windows and maybe Mac OS X (I haven't tried this yet, but I'm pretty sure that Mac OS X has had SAMBA support since 10.4). If you're interested I wrote an easy tutorial on how to setup RAID under LVM on OpenSUSE 11.1 with a GUI. This tutorial is nice for users that are new to Linux and not very comfortable with Terminal. Although, I would suggest getting to know mdadm as it has many features that aren't accessible from a GUI.

If your hard drives are SATA check your motherboard specs to see if it supports RAID. If it does use the hardware controller built into the BIOS to set up the raid array.

But bear in mind that is firmware or fakeraid using dmraid, not the same as a real hardware raid card; in fact it is essentially software RAID setup by the BIOS. Useful if you're dual booting Windows and want to share a compatible RAID, otherwise might be more hassle than it is worth. Bottom line, for your needs, stick with mdadm.

There are any number of ways to partition your drives. My advice would be to keep it simple. If all you want to do is mirror /home, then you should make a RAID 1 mirror set out of two of your drives, using the whole drive and mount that array as /home. Keep the third drive for everything else the way you have it.

Use the linux software raid for this reason: You eliminate a point of failure. You aren't tied to a particular hardware controller in order to recover your data.

Just drop the surviving drives into any computer with a SATA controller.

I've been using the raid tools for years and now with mdadm, it just gets better and better. I've recovered from several failed drives without a problem.