Hi all.

I am trying to setup a raid on my development machine and I would like to know what my best options are for raid.

My pc specs are
8 Gigabytes of ram
AMD CPU 3.5 8 Core

Hard drives are the following:
4 1 terabyte 6gb sec sata drives

What I am trying to accomplish is a performance setup with redundancy. I don't know a lot about raid but from what I have read I should use raid 10. With that said I am just wondering how this would map on on the drive.

This is what I plan to do and just want to make sure I am heading the right direction

Partition the drives with boot 100mb fd00 type /dev/sda1,sdb1,sdc1,sdd1

Partition the rest of the space for root / fd00 type

Using mdadm I will create a raid 1 setup for boot /boot /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 100mb

I will create a raid 10 setup for root / /dev/md1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd2 with the rest of the space

Do i need to save space for swap? Create a third raid 1?
/dev/md2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdd3

i'm not sure about performance issues, but i suggest using lvm then doing partitioning

Hey thanks for the response. I will have to read up on lvm I am only familiar with regular partitions so I will check into that options as well.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Slackware> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

RAID 10 is indeed a good option when using 4 disks. When you want to use LVM do first set up the RAID, then the LVM on top of it.
You do not need to set up an extra RAID for swap, if you give set up swap an all four disks the kernel will automatically figure out how to get the best performance and will create its own RAID for it.

Hi,

I recommends LVM as well.

It allows you to resize your partitions on-the-fly and to make snapshots of your FS.

When it comes to RAID, you will have to check the documentation of mdadm.

You should read this post too.

Thanks all for your very helpfull advice I am on the new slackware workstation now with the raid 10 lvm setup and it is awesome!