Re: RAID partitions, or RAID disks and partition array?

[NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>]

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On Fri, 22 Aug 2014 09:52:11 -0700 Adam Talbot <ajtalbot1@gmail.com> wrote:

> I hope this is an easy one.  I have two drives I would like to mirror
> as my boot drive.
> 1) Should I mirror the drives, then partition the RAID device (md0)?
> 2) Should I partition the the drives then RAID the partitions?
> 
> What is the best practice, and why?

I always do '1'.  I use 1.0 metadata so each drive can be used by itself quite
apart from RAID, or can be part of the array.
Boot sectors etc are mirrored so you don't need to be sure that grub writes
to both devices or whatever.

However this is "my" practice rather than "best" practice.  It is entirely
possible that grub might try to be too clever, see a RAID1 and want to do
something to the underlying drives - and then fail when they look wrong.

Ultimately this is a question about how your distro is configured and how
your boot loader works much more than it is a question about md/raid.

Once you choose a distro, you should see what that distro recommends and do
that, because that is the only configuration you can hope to get support for.

NeilBrown

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