LVM on top of RAID5
I'm turning my old Pentium III 800 MHz box into a Linux RAID5 server. Steps are:
- Acquired four 200GB IDE drives
- Acquired Highpoint Rocket133 IDE adapter card because the motherboard does not have enough IDE connectors. I may need another one because the Software RAID HOWTO says that each drive should have its own channel instead of sharing one (master/slave) between two drives (because when a master/slave dies, it may take the correspond slave/master with it).
- Format each drive with
fdisk
. Create one full size partition with typeFD
. - Create the RAID5 with
mdadm
: - Make the new
/dev/md0
available for LVM use:pvcreate /dev/md0
- From the LVM Tutorial, create LVM volume group named
vgdata
with 32MB extent:vgcreate -s 32M vgdata /dev/md0
- Create LVM logical volume named
lvdata
:
17885 is the total number of LVM extents (at 32MB each) in my RAID. Uselvcreate -l 17885 -n lvdata vgdata
vgdisplay
to find out how many free extents you have. - Format logical volume with
reiserfs
:mkreiserfs /dev/vgdata/lvdata
- mount it:
mount /dev/vgdata/lvdata /mnt/data
- Wait a heck of a long time for the RAID to build properly (may take overnight). Check
/proc/mdstat/
periodically to see if the recovery has completed. Thecat
output should look like this:
Do not reboot your machine until the recovery is complete as it'll just start all over again.Personalities : [raid5] md0 : active raid5 hdh1[3] hdg1[2] hdf1[1] hde1[0] 586075008 blocks level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU] unused devices: