On Sat May 30, 2009 at 02:35:24PM -0400, Maxime Boissonneault wrote:

quoted

quoted

I can not install more drives in the computer. It is a home theater 
computer in a small case. I was expecting to be able to let the raid 
manage the copies itself.

If the / was on a RAID5, would it be able to boot with 2 disks ?
If so, is it possible to convert my RAID0 to a RAID5 ?
For example, I could boot on a CD, backup / onto /home, delete the RAID0 
array and recreate it as RAID5, then restore the backup. Would this work 
?

Based on my testing (somewhat old now) and regular use, I would say raid10 
is probably your best bet. It's fast and secure, and with the -f2 option 
for "far" copies it's able to give high transfer rates.

Doesn't RAID10 means RAID 1+0, which requires 4 disks ?

Yes and no!  Linux software (md) raid implements RAID10 as a single
layer (rather than layering RAID0 and RAID1), allowing the number of
drives and the number of replicas to be pretty arbitrary.  The basic
principle holds though - you'll still have 2 (or more if specified)
replicas of each data block, and blocks are striped across the drives.

You can read the details on the md manual page.

Cheers,
    Robin
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