Arch Linux

digitalpetra

Member

Registered: 2017-01-14

Posts: 3

[solved] Partitioning Arch Linux for RAID 0

Dear fellows,

I'm stuck while installing Arch Linux for the second time on a laptop.
In the first place I succeeded because I only partitioned one drive... (by simply following the wiki-guide)
and then I noticed that it only ran on a 128 GB SSD.

Long story short: I want to do a clean installation now.
With 256 GB SSD and a RAID0 filesystem.
And I just don't know how to partition my drives... any clue?

I thought of something as following (the number list refers to the RAID0 order of partitions):

DISK0:
1 - /boot 300M
3 - /         40G
5 - /home (the rest)

DISK1:
2 - swap 8G
4 - /home (the rest)

Is it a good solution?
Could anybody please help me?
Thanks for reading! Don't hesitate to ask questions for more informations...

Last edited by digitalpetra (2017-01-16 17:48:51)

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,286

Re: [solved] Partitioning Arch Linux for RAID 0

Wiki -> LVM
Wiki -> btrfs

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,523

Website

Re: [solved] Partitioning Arch Linux for RAID 0

Why on earth would you put a RAID 0 on a pair of SSDs ... especially when one of those SSDs is twice the size of the other?

Also, your partition layout makes no sense - RAID 0 treats the multiple disks of the array as one volume.  What does DISK 0 and DISK 1 then refer to?  You have /home on two different logical partitions? This also just doesn't add up.

Lastly, while I've not kept up on the details of the argument, it seems generally ill-advised to have a swap partition on an SSD.  Many people go without swap all together (myself included).

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

digitalpetra

Member

Registered: 2017-01-14

Posts: 3

Re: [solved] Partitioning Arch Linux for RAID 0

Thank you Awebb and Trilby for your answers...
Actually I forgot to mention my hardware details:
I have 2 x SSD of 128 GB ... and wanted to do RAID0 to append them together (so 256 GB).

But now I'm thinking of simply mount them both and just use them as two partitions...

Kind regards,
d

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,523

Website

Re: [solved] Partitioning Arch Linux for RAID 0

I would advise against RAID 0 ... pretty much regardless of circumstances, but especially with SSDs.

The *only* purpose of RAID 0 is to increase disk access speed on slow hard disks, and this comes at a cost.  With SSDs you would not get any benefit, certainly not a detectable benefit, and you would incur the cost of one disk failing resulting in complete data loss for everything on both disks.

But you also do not need to use them just as 2 partitions.  They can each be partitioned however you like and you can have your OS split across both disks - this has absolutely nothing to do with RAID 0, this is just partitioning.  You could put /boot / and perhaps a data partition on one (the data partition could be mounted under home), and /home on the other, or any other set up that suits you.

Definitely do not use RAID 0 simply because you want to use two physical disks.

In contrast you may want to consider LVM.  I believe (I have no experience with LVM) this would allow you to treat the two devices as a single device, and allow home to use a full drive plus part of the other seemlessly.  But this is still not RAID.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

digitalpetra

Member

Registered: 2017-01-14

Posts: 3

Re: [solved] Partitioning Arch Linux for RAID 0

ok thanks a lot!

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,286

Re: [solved] Partitioning Arch Linux for RAID 0

But you also do not need to use them just as 2 partitions.  They can each be partitioned however you like and you can have your OS split across both disks - this has absolutely nothing to do with RAID 0, this is just partitioning.  You could put /boot / and perhaps a data partition on one (the data partition could be mounted under home), and /home on the other, or any other set up that suits you.

Definitely do not use RAID 0 simply because you want to use two physical disks.

In contrast you may want to consider LVM.  I believe (I have no experience with LVM) this would allow you to treat the two devices as a single device, and allow home to use a full drive plus part of the other seemlessly.  But this is still not RAID.

Like I said ;-)