[mythtv-users] Question re: available SATA ports and linux software RAID

[John Drescher]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Tyler T <tylernt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Some people hate downtime even when the OS-disk fails,
>>> most choose to solve that by using a raid1 volume as boot.
>>> It makes failure a bit les destructive...
>
>>Ahh, RAID-1 sounds a rather good idea for the OS. I could
>> make use of some 320GB's lying around.
>
> Just FYI, Linux mdadm software will RAID partitions just as well as disks
> (which I have done myself with success on more than one machine). For
> example, you could make a small OS partition and large recordings partition
> on each of your 2TB drives. Then you can RAID-1 the OS partitions and RAID-6
> the recordings partitions. With 8 disks, you'd have a LOT of redundancy for
> the OS :) but this doesn't seem any more silly than cramming another two OS
> drives into a machine that already has a bunch of others generating heat and
> noise and sucking power.
>
> And as long as you set up your bootloader on every drive, you can boot from
> any of the drives -- so even if all but one of your disks fail, you can
> still boot the OS partition.

I do this for /boot on all of my linux raid servers at work. I mean I
raid1 the /boot with every drive in the system. Although grub1 will
only allow you to install a bootloader on the first 8 drives. I do not
raid1 the os however that gets the same raid level as the data (most
likely raid6) but I do have a separate raid for os versus data.

John