Linux and RAID
 

Hi All,

I am about to buy a Dell server with an IDE CERC RAID card with the intention of mirroring the two 80GB IDE hard disks.

Does anyone know if Linux will have any issues booting from a RAID 1 disk (There will be do no other HDD, just the RAID).

Will the CERC work well with Linux (Everything I've read points to yes on this one).

And finaly, has anyone used Software RAID - Could I get away with using this and save myself £200 on a RAID card?

Thanks for any info! :)

Linux supports booting from RAID, but I think you would want to check if your distribution supports booting from the exact hardware you intend to use first.

I have used LVM (a software RAID variant) successfully on several machines. Make sure you put the drives on different IDE channels (just use the masters on each channel) or you'll end up with an excrushiatingly slow system. I prefer keeping a small boot partition (less than 100MB) to store the bootloader and kernels on but that's just me. Everything else I dedicate to LVM.


Håkan