Hello,

I am setting up a software RAID system on top of Suse 10.2 using mdadm. I have read several different opinions regarding what to do with swap in a RAID setup. I plan on having two mirrored hard drives. I would like the system to be able to continue running even if a disk crashes.

I have read some places that it would best to set up a swap partition on each disk using RAID 0 to increase performance. However, if a single disk crashes will the system continue to run or will it even boot with only one disk available from a 0 swap array?

Also, I have seen some people say that using RAID1 on the swap partitions in the best thing to do and will make sure that the computer will continue running even if one drive fails. However, others have said that this is not needed since it will reduce swap speed and is unnecessary.

And lastly, people have said that it is best to keep the swap partition out of the array completely and just prioritize the partitions in fstab. If I go this route, if a drive crashes that contains needed swap data, won't the entire system go down or segfault?

Does anybody have any opinions on which is the best solution to accommodate the swap partition if I want the computer to continue running even if a single drive crashes?

Thanks,
-Tom

Raid0 is very fast but has no backup. If one disk on a raid0 setup crashes you loose everything.


Raid1 is much slower. Essentially one disk is the backup of the other. If one crashes you should be able to stick in a replacement drive and rebuild.

Two 100gb disks in a raid0 setup will give you about 200gb storage space. Two 100gb disks in a raid1 will give you about 100gb of storage space.