Stupid RAID question

[Andrej Marjan]

On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 3:55 PM, Andrej Marjan <andrej-igvx78u1SeH3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> I've been having rotten luck with reliability of 1TB drives, so I'm finally
> biting the bullet and trying to figure out RAID. So far I have a tenuous,
> but (seemingly) working grasp of how to make device mapper do RAID1 and how
> to make it play nice with grub and LVM.
>
> My question: is it possible to do a new install into a sort of "degraded"
> RAID1 setup with only a single drive, and then add the second drive later,
> or do I need to wait until I acquire the second drive before installing?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrej
>

Thanks to everyone for the informative responses. It seems that among other
things, I got the terminology wrong: I'm actually looking at using mdadm
with 2 drives in a RAID 1 setup with drives from different batches or
manufacturers. I have good backups, so the specific failure case to be
avoided is when the drive dies and I have no computer until I get another
drive and waste a bunch of time re-installing. Anything more (RAID5, RAID10)
seems like it would be overkill for me.

So I think the solution would be, for each drive:
- 512MB RAID1 boot partition, formatted to ext3
- 8 GB swap
- rest of the drive RAID1 partition with LVM for root and home, all ext4 at
this time
- grub in the MBR of both disks

Done right, this is supposed to survive a single hard drive failure (either
disk can boot into a working system by itself) and give me a few days to
replace the other drive and rebuild the RAID.

Am I missing something?

Thanks again,

Andrej
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