HOWTO configure raid on 2 separated drives (HD)

[adthiel]

I will explain my problem a little bit before asking the question again.
At the moment I have a 136GB HD installed on which Debian runs (ext3).
I want to make a raid 0 with 2 other drives (500GB each) and these drives need to be able to be formatted as NTFS, as I want them to be the place where samba server put all the files. Later on, I want to add 2 more drives (500GB each) to make a raid 0+1.
Is this possible??
I'm sorry if this question was already done, but I have search for it but couldn't find it.

[marchost]

I dont think its possible to redo the array from 0 to 10 without loosing data on the disk.

What you could try is :

do a raid0 array with disk A and B, let say the array is called /dev/md1

Latter you create another raid0 array with disk C and D, let say the array is called /dev/md2

Then do a raid1 array with /dev/md1 and /dev/md2

I never tried that, I dont know if its possible to create array with raid devices...

Marc

[adthiel]

Marc, thanks, i will try this setup. but will the OS keep on running on the 160GB drive while I can make the raid10 with the 500GB disks to be the home directory for the users???? I just want the OS to run on the 160GB, which I plan to make an array0, cause I have many services running on it, and it has to be fast enough to handle all request (i will be running freeradius, mysql and php on the same server besides samba). For this it's not a problem for loosing data (i have backup), i just wanted to know if this is possible... thanks in advance

[marchost]

Your 160GB will have nothing to do with the 2x500GB.

Simply mount the 1TB array (2x500GB) at /home once its created.

I use linux software raid and its fantastic...

You can destroy, create and repair arrays without rebooting...

Also one great feature is that you can mix raid type.

For example, with 2x500GB (each drive in 2x250GB partition) you could :

2x250GB in raid 1 (250GB usable)
2x250GB in raid 0 (500GB usable)

If you just need the speed but not 1TB you could do that and do backups on the raid1 array.

read http://blogama.org/node/8, further down it explains how to create arrays with mdadm

[adthiel]

thanks for your reply. At the moment I'm running solaris and debian, because of the benefit of the zones that I have with solaris, but maybe I can run another file server that runs on debian.