[Beowulf] RAID for home beowulf

[Tomislav Maric]

Skylar Thompson wrote:
> Tomislav Maric wrote:
>> First of all: thank you very much for the advice, Skylar. :)
>>
>> So, all I need to do is to create the same partitions on three disks and
>> set up a RAID 5 on /home since I'll be doing CFD simulations (long
>> sequential writes) and use RAID 1 for other (system) partitions, to
>> account for recovery of the system in case of disk failure because log
>> writes are sequential and small in volume. I was reading about RAID 0,
>> but I'm not sure how safe is to use it for storing computed data and how
>> much speed would I get compared to RAID 5.
>>   
> 
> Cool. If you have zippy processors the overhead of calculating parity
> probably isn't going to be too high, so RAID 5 and RAID 0 will be
> comparable. Sequential reads and writes are ideal for RAID 5.
> 
>> Sorry for the totally newbish questions.
>>
>> I'm using Ubuntu, and after I install it, I'll try to configure the RAID
>> manually. How do I make sure that the boot loader is on all disks? I
>> mean, isn't RAID going to make the OS look at the /boot partition that's
>> spread over 3 HDDs as a single mount point?
>>
>>   
> 
> You'd mount /boot using the /dev/md? device, but point your boot loader
> at one of the underlying /dev/sd? or /dev/hd? devices. This means
> updates get mirrored, but the boot loader itself only looks at one of
> the mirrors.
> 

Thanks a lot! There's just one thing left: to make it work in real
life.... :))

Best regards,
Tomislav