Drak's Linux RAID Setup

Here's a somewhat vague guide showing you how to set up software RAID 5 in Linux using three 320GB drives!

Hard drives are very delicate, sensitive equipment. Luckily mine were entrusted to the care of UPS.

You should always take great care in opening the package.

My server doesn't have SATA onboard, so it's a good thing I bought something called an "adaptor."

Three is better than less than three!

I seem to be missing something... You should make sure you have enough cables before buying lots of expensive things that require them.

Thanks Dad!

Mmmm... storage. Old drives are at the top, 3 shiny new ones are at the bottom.

Drives are in! The case I'm using is an Antec Sonata 2, which has fantastic drive sleds.

Here's some ninja cable management. I could have been a bit more stealthy with the power cables but I'm not that obsessed about it. You might consider getting a front fan as well, since these drives will heat up if you use them a lot.

I still need to get the data off of my old drives onto the new ones, but there's not enough room in the case for 6 drives so that's a problem. This method is not recommended for beginners. Here you can also see a Google Spider trying to index all of my data. BAD SPIDER!

Free space? Yes... yes indeed.

For configuring Linux Software RAID, take a look at this HOWTO. One thing I did need to do which I found at this page is set up partitions on each drive. All you need is one primary partition at the maximum size with type fd (Linux raid autodetect). Your /etc/raidtab can then look something like this:

raiddev /dev/md0
	raid-level	5
	nr-raid-disks	3
	nr-spare-disks	0
	persistent-superblock	1
	parity-algorithm	left-symmetric
	chunk-size	64
	device	/dev/sda1
	raid-disk	0
	device	/dev/sdb1
	raid-disk	1
	device	/dev/sdc1
	raid-disk	2

Save that, then issue mkraid /dev/md0. This step will take quite a while. The HOWTO says you can format and start using the raid as soon as mkraid starts to go, but I didn't want to mess anything up so I wrote this guide while I waited. Next you can format /dev/md0 with your filesystem of choice, and add it to your /etc/fstab.