On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 01:50:31PM -0600, Josh Trutwin wrote:
> Thanks - I had some other off-list replies too which have been 
> helpful.  I guess my biggest concern now is how to create a RAID 
> starting with an existing system.  Do I have to partition the second 
> drive the same as my current one?  I'm still reading up on a lot of 
> this so I'm still weeks (maybe months?) from going forward.

AFAICT RAID-1 partitions don't need to be exactly the same size.  The
HOWTO says "You have two devices of approximately same size, and you
want the two to be mirrors of each other...".  One slick thing I just
learned is that you can specify "spare" partitions to be swapped in
should the primary partitions fail.  Neat.

> I guess it doesn't take the place of a good backup strategy, but as I
> see it with a RAID-1 setup if one of the drives goes bad you should be 
> able to use the other drive while you replace the faulty one.  I think 
> that's a bit of an oversimplification though.

That is my understanding as well.  Others with more experience may have
learned otherwise.  :-)

-- 
trammell at el-swifto.com  9EC7 BC6D E688 A184 9F58  FD4C 2C12 CC14 8ABA 36F5
Twin Cities Linux Users Group (TCLUG)      Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota