[sclug] Raiding partitions

[Neil Haughton]

Can anyone help me with some advice?

Following a yet another hard drive disaster (head crash) I'm doing 
something to prevent the anguish  from re-occurring. Can anyone advise 
me what I need to do to set up partition-partition mirroring?

I have two drives now, an 80G drive ADA-133 (/dev/hda) which has a 40G 
partition for my home partition, and a 40G ATA-100 drive (/dev/hdc), 
which I want to use as a mirror for the home partition on hda. I'm not 
bothered about mirroring the other 40Gb 'system and apps' partition.

Can this done with an IDE PCI RAID card (I've seen a cheap PCI IFDE RAID 
card in Maplins), or is it best done using software RAID?

BTW I'm using Mandrake 10.0 and WinXP Pro (dual boot), so my 40G 'home' 
partitions are each really two partitions, a 20G Linux /home and a 20G 
Windows 'drive D:'. I was hoping to get both pairs of partitions to be 
synchronised when I run Linux (which is most of the time).

Is this the right approach, and how should I proceed? Any pitfalls to 
look out for?

BTW If you get the temptation to buy an IBM/Hitachi DeskStar drive, 
don't. I've twice in succession had mine fail under warranty within 2 
years. Must be the most unreliable drives I've ever come across.

Regards,

Neil Haughton