Re: Software RAID w/ mdadm -- Need Partitions?

[Kelly Harding <kelly.harding@gmail.com>]

2009/2/26 Kelly Harding <kelly.harding@gmail.com>:
> 2009/2/25 Owen Townend <owen.townend@gmail.com>:
>> Hal Vaughan wrote:
>>> I've created RAIDs in the past where I just used the entire drive and
>>> ones where I created a single partition on the drives and used the
>>> partition.  It seems that there is no real difference in behavior.
>>>
>>> If I'm planning on using a drive for a RAID, is there any reason I
>>> should create a single partition spanning the entire drive and using
>>> that instead of just using the drive in its entirety for the RAID?
>>>

I've used RAID5 with the raid mounted from /dev/md0 with XFS
filesystem directly on it, without issues.

This works fine for large media volumes.

My intention is to move /home to a RAID1 with LVM on top so I can
change the size of the partitions on top of the RAID array and have it
split into more than just /home should I feel th eneed.

Also, with Linux Software RAID, you can convert the metadata of RAID1
to RAID5 to expand a 2 drive RAID1 mirrored array to a 2 drive RAID5
degraded array to add another drive to later. I've done this multiple
times and had no problems with it.

Kelly