[K12OSN] Hard Drive Conundrum

[Liam Marshall]

Liam Marshall wrote:

> Liam Marshall wrote:
>
>> I am contemplating a hard drive switch.  Here is the current 
>> configuration
>>
>> cheap 2 gb ide drive primary master with /boot residing on it
>> cheap 52x cdrom secondary master
>>
>> Adaptec 2940U2/UW scsi controller
>>
>> cheap old and slow seagate ST318418N  7200 rpm 18 gb scsi drive  
>> identified as sda with /home    /opt   and the swap on it
>>
>> cheap old and slow ibm DDRs-3913OD 7200 rpm with /root and all else 
>> linux on it
>>
>> K12LTSP 4.0? on it.  (haven't gone to 4.1 during the school year out 
>> of fear of losing all that is currently setup on it ie users, 
>> software etc.)
>>
>> I want to explore different had drives to get more storage space and 
>> speed.  before I can do that however I need to know a few things
>>
>> 1.  I thought putting /home /opt and /swap on a different drive was a 
>> good thing, performance wise.  Was I wrong?  should I try to keep 
>> everything on one drive or keep things separate?  would I lose 
>> performance, in otherwords, if I get a single, larger drive to 
>> replace the 2 I currently use?
>>
>> 2.  How would I go about copying the drive's partitions to the new 
>> drive(s)  as the partitions are currently separated across multiple 
>> drives I can't just clone the drives, which I know how to do in the 
>> windoze world but not in linux anyway.
>>
>> 3.  I am wondering whether to stick with scsi or go EIDE.  I am 
>> assuming that if I get even EIDE drives with a much higher rpm speed 
>> than my slow scsi drives that I will see something of a performance 
>> increase, even if I am "downgrading" to EIDE from scsi?
>>
>> 4.  can I do some form of raid with EIDE?  I assume I would need a 
>> controller card for this.
>>
>>
>>
>> help greatly appreciated
>>
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>>
> I also need a ide raid controller recommendation that we know works 
> with linux.
>
> correct me if I am wrong but most should as the raid work is done 
> before linux is involved, right?  I mean, I played with a cheap dell 
> system that had a 2 drive ide configuration attached to a raid 
> controller card and during the installation of K12LTSP 4.0 it detected 
> only 1 drive
>
what ide raid level would be best for both redundancy and performance?  
is that raid 0+1?  and would any raid controller do that?