[K12OSN] Raid 0

[Les Mikesell]

> I am installing on the disk, I could use more specific info, what
> partitions do I need to create and what size? I am new to linux, and this is
> to be an experimental lab. 

If I were doing it myself, I'd put / and /home on separate drives
instead of striping.  Letting the heads seek independently is probably
more of a win than combining the transfer rate.  With that approach
you would want about 100 Megs for /boot, 1 to 2 gigs of swap, and
the rest for / on /dev/hda, and /home taking all of /hdc (assuming
your 2nd drive is primary on the 2nd controller).   If you really
want raid0, first think about the size you want for each final
partition, then create a raid partition with half that size on each
drive, then combine them to get the md device with the right amount
of space.  There is less reason to keep /home as a separate partition
with raid0, but it might still be worthwhile when you upgrade to
a newer release because you can do a fresh install without reformatting
/home if it is a separate partition.  This avoids some possible
problems you might have with upgrading a system in place and is
usually faster if you know how to fix up the password file, etc. to
get the users back.

I always make /boot a separate small partion if the drive has more
than 1024 cylinders to avoid any bios limits when booting, but I'm
not sure if that is absolutely necessary these days.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com