Hello,

I'm about to replace windows on my main computer, with Linux. When I do this, and I'm in that transitional state, I'd also like to put my two main HDDs in a RAID 0. I have 3 hard drives in this computer. Two 120GB SATA drives and a 160GB ATA drive. I want to put the two SATA drives in a RAID 0. While I'm switching to linux I will be redoing all of the partitions anyway, so I figured this was a good time.

Now, RAID is something that I have never really done, nor learned much about how to do.

I'm planning to copy all of my important data off of the two 120GB drives onto the 160GB drive. Then setup the RAID and partitions and OS on the 120GB drives. Then put the data back and reformat and partition the 160GB drive.

I am completely ignorant about how to actually go about setting up the RAID. I did setup a RAID 5 with VMware once, from within RedHat. But how I understand it, if I were to re-install RedHat on that computer, or replace it with something else, the RAID would die? Since it is defined from within the OS. I'm not really sure how this works, I'm confused. I want it setup in such a way that I can switch between distributions without havnig to do anything to my partitions or RAID configuration. I don't really understand how you can define a RAID within the OS that is installed upon that RAID. Because wouldn't the RAID have to be there before installing it?

I don't know, I'm confused. Could somebody please shed some light on this for me? And please give me some tips and/or links?

Thanks in advance,
Jef

PS: I don't know if this was the appropriate forum to be posting in; but I wasn't even sure if it was a software or a hardware issue. Sorry if it belongs somewhere else.

Its ok to use RAID 0 but you are going to have some problems making more than one partition. I suggest RAID 1 (mirroring) because the speed of loading programs will take less time than before, you have an option to create partitions, and reduntancy will be included that was lost in RAID 0 setup. RAID 0 should only be used when transferring big files (>100 MB) over a 1 Gbit network, video recording, sound recording, or dealing with huge files.

Go to tldp.org for some information about setting up software RAID in Linux. You may want to look into dm-raid, a Linux module or driver to make Linux behave correctly with software RAID BIOS, if you are using the software RAID that is built-in the controller BIOS.

BTW, make sure you use FAT32 for partitions that you want to read and write in Linux because Linux has some problems when writing to NTFS partitions.