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kashishme

Member

Registered: 2021-01-08

Posts: 175

[SOLVED]What should i take care of while switching to RAID?

I want to switch to RAID configuration on my laptop so do i have to reinstall the whole system again, because I don't want to so is there anything i have to take care of othere than the things written in the wiki (asking to be cautious, so I don't screw up my drives..... again)

my storage config is 256gb ssd + 1tb hdd

Ps i wasn't sure under what topic whould i post this so did it here as its a laptop (dell g3 3590) so apologies....

Thank you

Last edited by kashishme (2021-09-06 04:19:37)

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: [SOLVED]What should i take care of while switching to RAID?

How were you planning to RAID those 2 drives together? Your drive setup doesn't make sense, usually all drives are the same size in a RAID.

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No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
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kashishme

Member

Registered: 2021-01-08

Posts: 175

Re: [SOLVED]What should i take care of while switching to RAID?

I actually just know that raid saves data if things crash, my laptop does have a bios option for the config so that's how. I can use raid configuration right?

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: [SOLVED]What should i take care of while switching to RAID?

If you put those 2 disks together in a RAID1 then you'll end up with 256GB of storage at HD speed - is that what you want?

Using FakeRAID (which is what your motherboard supports) will require a full reinstall.

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No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
Closing -- for deletion; Banning -- for muppetry. - jasonwryan

aur - dotfiles

kashishme

Member

Registered: 2021-01-08

Posts: 175

Re: [SOLVED]What should i take care of while switching to RAID?

If you put those 2 disks together in a RAID1 then you'll end up with 256GB of storage at HD speed - is that what you want?

Using FakeRAID (which is what your motherboard supports) will require a full reinstall.

ok.... what is fakeraid?

merlock

Member

Registered: 2018-10-30

Posts: 236

Re: [SOLVED]What should i take care of while switching to RAID?

Wiki article.

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frostschutz

Member

Registered: 2013-11-15

Posts: 1,418

Re: [SOLVED]What should i take care of while switching to RAID?

If you make a raid1 of SSD + HDD partition with mdadm, you should set the HDD to write-mostly, so the very much faster SSD will still be used to serve reads exclusively.

It's more common to buy drives in pairs and use multiple identical drives for RAID. But you can do it with mixed SSD+HDD if you don't mind sacrificing write speed for the sake of redundancy.

If you don't set write-mostly you'll also sacrifice read speeds.

And yes, by default, setting up raid will lose you data that was there before. You can juggle with partitions and filesystems or (much easier) create a backup copy on external storage then set things up properly.

Last edited by frostschutz (2021-09-05 13:43:57)

kashishme

Member

Registered: 2021-01-08

Posts: 175

Re: [SOLVED]What should i take care of while switching to RAID?

Thank you to all for your time, I guess i am better off without the raid configuration.