[BlueOnyx:01345] Re: 4 X 1 TERABYTE HD ON BLUEONYX

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Rodrigo,

> What will happen with the BO Installer if I have 4x 1 TB hard drives.
>
> Will it make raid AUTOMATICALLY and show 2 terabytes available to BO?

Yes, that's correct. It will see all four disks and will set up RAID 
accordingly.

To be more precise: If the installer sees four disks, then it will create a 
RAID 0+1 for you:

		   |---- [DISK1]---(RAID0/LVM)----[DISK3] 
-(RAID1)--|
		   |---- [DISK2]---(RAID0/LVM)----[DISK4]

So two disks each are bundled into a RAID0 array for more storage. Then both 
"bundles" are turned into a RAID1.

That way you get (roughly) 2 TB of total storage, with redundancy against data 
loss.

I'd have loved to do a real RAID10 automatically (instead of a "dirty" RAID0+1 
with two LVM's), but Anaconda (the CentOS installer) doesn't support that yet.

To prevent the installer from doing RAID0+1 automatically for you when you 
have four disks, you have several options:

1.) Use hardware RAID and use the RAID controller to configure the disks to an 
array that suits you better. BX will then just "see" a single disk and does a 
regular install. Which is fine, as the hardware controller does the real magic 
of syncing the disks.

2.) To install BlueOnyx with a partitioning scheme of your own choosing, boot 
off the CD and instead of pressing "return" at the splash screen, enter "self" 
(for self partitioning). That will launch you into DiskDruid, where you can 
configure the partitioning yourself.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber