Re: RAID

[John Jason Jordan <johnxj@comcast.net>]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:23:59 -0700
Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> dijo:

> On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 03:07:49PM -0300, Rogerio wrote:
> > I want use RAID in Debian, do I have to use the MDADM package?  Is it the
> > best choice??
> 
> for software RAID where the RAID array is controlled by the kernel,
> then yes, use mdadm.

I have installed Etch amd64 on a new computer that I just built. Its
ultimate purpose is to serve as storage for backups from my other two
computers, plus to be a way to get on the net when I goober up my Linux
laptop, which is unfortunately a fairly frequent occurrence. The
motherboard has onboard RAID 0 and RAID 1 capability, but all my Linux
friends told me to use Linux software RAID instead, which is what I
did. Each drive has a 2 GB swap partition and a 50 GB Etch partition,
assembled as md0 and md1. I wish to use the rest of each disk (250 GB)
for storage of backups, also as RAID 1.

I thought I could do this from within Etch, but gparted doesn't grok
RAID-anything. Just now I tried mdadm and it turns out that it is
command line only -- scary for a newbie like me! I can use gparted to
create the ext3 partitions, but since it can't handle RAID, do I have
to use mdadm to assemble them? Or is there a better tool?