The Next Step
Even if you spend large amounts of time planning and architecting your array, making a mistake is nearly inevitable. I think the best advice I can give for building these systems is: don’t worry if it doesn’t work perfectly the first time around. Trying out multiple solutions and then deciding which one best suits your needs is much more worthwhile than sitting at a whiteboard for three weeks, trying to plan in advance. Hopefully, this chapter has given you the information you need to get started in building a software RAID solution.
Choosing an appropriate RAID level is only the first step. You might need to trade some of the dollars you had planned to spend on storage capacity for a hardware controller. Chapter 5 offers advice on how to make that decision. But software RAID might help you to prototype the right system without spending much money. The next chapter offers reference material on the md driver, raidtools, and mdadm, which will help supplement the material in this chapter. Chapter 4 also contains more /etc/raidtab and mdadm examples that can help make your configurations more robust by using spare disks and hybrid arrays.
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