Re: [gentoo-user] RAID 1 install guide?

[J. Roeleveld]

On Thu, September 5, 2013 05:04, James wrote:
> Hello,
>
> What would folks recommend as a Gentoo
> installation guide for a 2 disk Raid 1
> installation? My previous attempts all failed
> to trying to follow (integrate info from)
> a myriad-malaise of old docs.

I would start with the Raid+LVM Quick install guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2-quickinstall.xml

> It seems much of the documentation for such is
> deprecated, with large disk, newer file systems
> (ZFS vs ext4 vs ?) UUID, GPT mdadm,  etc etc.

Depending on the size of the disk, fdisk or gdisk needs to be used.
Filesystems, in my opinion, matter only for the data intended to be put on.

For raid-management, I use mdadm. (Using the linux kernel software raid)
If you have a REAL hardware raid card, I would recommend using that.
(Cheap and/or onboard "raid" is generally slower then the software raid
implementation in the kernel and the added bonus of being able to recover
the raid using any other linux installation helps.

> File system that is best for a Raid 1 workstation?

I use Raid0 (striping) on my workstations with LVM and, mostly, ext4
filesystems. The performance is sufficient for my needs.
All my important data is stored on a NAS with hardware Raid-6, so I don't
care if I loose the data on the workstations.

> File system that is best for a Raid 1
> (casual usage) web server ?

Whichever filesystem would be best if you don't use Raid.
Raid1 means all data is duplicated, from a performance P.O.V., it is not a
good option. Not sure if distributed reads are implemented yet in the
kernel.

> Time for me to try and spank this gator's ass again.....
> (not exactly what happend last time).

I implemented this on 2 machines recently. (Using Raid0) and previously
also on an older server (no longer in use) where I used Raid1.
I always used the Gentoo Raid+LVM guide I mentioned above.

If you have any questions while doing this, feel free to ask on this list.

--
Joost