Re: Partition or whole disk ?

[Dieter Stueken <stueken@conterra.de>]

Josh Litherland wrote:
> Couldn't find an authoritative answer to this in the faq or elsewhere...
> Is it preferred to build md sets out of whole disks or of partitions ? 
> Is there any functional reason why either one is better ?

If you make partitions, about one track is is "wasted" to store
the useless partition table. Thus I used whole disks for a long time.

The problem might be, that "fdisk -l" won't show up if this
disk is an MD device. It shows an empty partition table which
may look like an unused/empty disk. If you create the partition
table, you may waste some data, but fdisk may show this is a
disk with a partition containing some MD data on it.

Meanwhile I turned back to make partition tables again,
just to "tag" the disk as "in use". If I put a new disk
into my system, it has no partition table. Thus I can verify
this condition, before I initialize the disk. This may prevent
me from accidentally initialize/destroying some disk in use,
which already has an partition table.

Dieter.