RAID, hard drives, etc
 

Hi all..

Ok, here's my dilemna. I have a server running RH9 (I know, get with the times) with two 160GB hard drives. One of the HD has /var one one single partition and the other HD has the rest of the / filesystem and /boot partition, /swap, etc.

Here is what I want to do. I have another HD, ~20GB or so, that I want to load a new, fresh operating system on (FC2 or RHEL3). I would then like to take the two 160GB drives I have and set up a RAID 1 array (mirroring, right?) for redundancy purposes. I have a ton ( ~90GB or so) of important files on the current /var partition.

My question is probably predictable -- HOWTO do all of this, what is the best RAID card for the job, etc.

Here are a few of my requirements, however:

1. Looking for something reasonably easy. I am Linux->Functional, not a Linux->Guru
2. RAID hard drives are ATA133... not looking for fancy RAID card - 2ch is fine
3. Prefer RHEL3. I have a free compiled-from-source version running on another machine which is fine.
4. I don't mind making backups of my 90GB files -- there is a DVD burner on the machine and I have downloaded partimage, however honestly I have no idea how to save/where to put backed up partitions, etc...

Help!

Much thanks in advance...

-mrmike-