I have recently suffered an IBM "DeathStar" failure followed by the failure of it's replacement drive, a Maxtor 40GB ATA133 drive, that failed a month after being installed. Now, I have installed and configured RH8 twice in once month, with my last installation being much easier as I had backups of /etc and all my data, but it still hurts.

I now have a nice sexy Seagate 80GB Barra IV ATA100, that BTW is faster than the Maxtor ATA133. I am using the Gigabyte GA-7VAXP RAID mobo, and have been looking into running RAID 1 with RH8 (Single boot - no Windows).

I thought this would be easy, but having read all the HOWTO's on Software/Hardware RAID 1 it appears a little tricky...

Now, here comes my question, I have this single Seagate 80GB drive, running currently as the Master on IDE 0 (hda). What I want to do is run RAID, using a 2nd identical drive. Whats the best way to do this? Am I right in thinking this is the best way:-

Small drive on IDE0 with my root system (hda)
2 x RAID 1 drives on the Promise IDE channels providing my data partitions.

Also, can anyone point me to a good HOWTO that explains how to migrate an existing installation to hardware RAID1.

(I am right in guessing software RAID has knobs on it?)

Thanks.

BTW, I am currently running kernel 2.4.19, with some patches applied...