[linux-lvm] Building up a RAID5 LVM home server (long)

[Erik Ohrnberger]

On Tue, March 1, 2005 11:43, Scott Serr said:
> Erik Ohrnberger wrote:
>
>>Dear Peeps of the LVM discussion list,

....snip....

>>The Questions:
>>==============
>>    It seems to me that RAID5 with at least one hot spare hard disk is
>> one
>>of the safest ways to go for this type of storage.  The only concern that
>> I
>>have is specific to the wide variety of hard disk sizes that I have
>>available (2 40GB, 1 60GB, 2 80GB, and I'll probably add the 200GB drive
>>once I've migrated that data off it to the array).  My limited
>> understanding
>>of RAID5 is that it's best if all the hard drives are exactly the same.
>> Is
>>this true?  What are the downsides of using such a mix of hard disk
>> sizes?
>>
>>
> The down side is the partitions that make up a RAID5 have to match in
> size, if they don't - the RAID5 just uses the minimum partition size of
> the set for EACH partition.  So if you have 20GB, 30GB, 40GB.  10GB of
> the 30GB will be wasted.  20GB of the 40GB will be wasted.  So you might
> as well use the wasted space for scratch etc.  You can optimize your
> disk use but you never want to include TWO partitions from one disk in
> the same RAID set.  Right?

Not including two partitions from the same drive into the same raid set
would make sense.  What would the redundancy of that be?  It wouldn't be.

However, I've been thinking on this.  What if I took two small drives
and raid-0'd them into a single larger block device, and then included
that into the raid5 set.  Is this possible?

20GB + 10GB (of 40GB) = md0 (raid 0)  then
md0 + 40GB (what's left) + 40 GB = md1 (raid 5)

Umm, right.  That would break the rules, 40GB is contributing twice to the
raid5 set.  Hmmm.

What if the I broke everything into 10 GB pieces, and created multiple raid5
sets?  Then I could LVM2 them together and have a large filesystem that way.

a=20GB, b=30GB, c=40GB

a-1 + b-1 + c-1 = md0 (approx 30 GB storage)
a-2 + b-2 + c-2 = md1 (approx 30 GB storage)
      b-3 + c-3 = md2 (waiting for one more drive)
            c-4 = md3 (waiting for two more drives)


>>    Being able to resize the storage is a key, as is having a robust and
>>reliable storage pool.  As storage demands rise and fall, it's great to
>> have
>>the flexibility to add and drop hard disks from the storage pool and use
>>them for other things, resizing the file system and the volume group as
>> you
>>go along, of course.  If the storage pool is RAID5, and I add a larger
>> hard
>>disk to the pool as a hot spare, and then use the software tools to fault
>>out the drive that I want, forcing a reconstruction, couldn't I pull the
>>faulted drive out, and use it for something else?  What sort of shape or
>>state will the RAID5 array be in at this point?  Will it use all of the
>>space on the newly added hot spare?
>>
>>
> I haven't use hot spares on Linux, a little on Solaris.  You could do
> what you say in theory.  But normally on low budget stuff it's not "hot
> plug" so you would have to shutdown and pull out your main drive.  In my
> situation this would be bad, because I don't do my / (root) on RAID5.  I
> could boot my "backup" root that I make with rsync, but then I would
> have to fix the fstab and make sure GRUB is installed on there and have
> a BIOS that will point to hdb (not just hda) for booting.

Well, I wasn't thinking hot swapping.  I'd shut the machine down to add and
remove hard disks, but the idea is to make use of the reconstruction as a
means for migrating hard disks into and out of the raid array, and it sounds
like that would work OK.

... snip ...