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I have two internal hard drives: a 4TB drive and a 750GB drive. After selecting RAID0 and installing Debian (wheezy) to a single partition, I ran fdisk -l
which reported that the size of my root partition (/dev/sda1) was 1.4T. So, I've got a couple of questions....
1) I know that fdisk only allows up to 2TB so even if my (4TB + 750GB) drive was being restricted to 2TB, what happened to the other 0.6TB? Remember, I installed everything to one partition.
2) My ultimate goal is to have everything on a single 4TB partition. I've read about parted
but everything I read relates to partitioning and mounting a non-bootable partition. This doesn't apply to me as I'm using a single partition which contains /boot
. What are my options?
Could you clarify your question. 1. How are you using a raid 0 with two different sized drives? 2. Is your drive GPT or MBR, – spuder – 2013-07-29T06:57:54.463
What is your kernel version ? With v0.90 raid superblock and kernel <3.1, you have severe limitations. see : https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_superblock_formats
– mveroone – 2013-07-29T07:55:46.730@Kwaio: Kernel is 3.2.0-4-686-pae. – Ash – 2013-07-29T08:00:58.170
Is your OS 64bit ? Is it up to date ? specifically, HBA drivers... – mveroone – 2013-07-29T08:02:41.463
@spuder: Why shouldn't I be able to use raid 0 with two different sized drives? It's raid 0 (not raid 1), so there's no mirroring. The disks can be any size. I'm sure it's MBR. Don't think GPT would give me this problem to begin with. – Ash – 2013-07-29T08:04:01.433
A Raid0 array is of the size of its smallest drive. That is how it works, blocs are split between all drives. – mveroone – 2013-07-29T08:05:20.693
1@spuder: I see. Well the SAS configuration utility on my Dell server gave me two options to set up the RAID array: mirroring and striping. I chose striping. I thought that would have given me maximum space but I guess I was wrong. You're correct. I've ended up with 2 * 750GB = 1.5TB worth of space. – Ash – 2013-07-29T08:14:14.880
You could check if your dell server's raid card has JOBD. That sounds like what you are trying to accomplish, however I would discourage raid or JOBD in this setup because loosing one drive looses both. Instead consider using the 750 for the OS, and the 2tb for your data. – spuder – 2013-07-29T08:18:57.013
I've checked every menu option during boot and I can't remember any reference to JOBD. I don't think I can do what you've suggested spuder as the configuration requires me to choose either mirroring or striping. I can't have a single hdd either. I think my best bet is to replace the smaller (750GB) drive with one of the same size as the bigger one (4TB). I'd then have to re-install the OS with /boot under a different partition and finally run parted to create a partition greater than 2TB.
Please suggest better alternatives if there are any. – Ash – 2013-07-29T08:23:03.543
In both cases, remember stripping isn't safe. Either schedule regular backups or avoid storing data you don't want to loose there. – mveroone – 2013-07-29T08:25:51.250