[sclug] RAID-1 on asymmetric disks?

[Will Dickson]

Hi all,

I've recently acquired a spare PC: nforce3 chipset and 2 PATA disks, one 
is 120GB and the other about 200GB. It seems to be fine, but given the 
amount of dreck I hoovered out of it before turning it back on, I'm 
slightly concerned about the life expectancy of the disks.

This gave me the following idea: use 60GB of the larger disk for a root 
filesystem etc, and gang one partition of the larger disk, plus the 
whole of the smaller disk, into a 120GB RAID-1 software mirror to use 
for data.

- Is this idea completely daft, or does it sound feasible?

- If feasible, what would be the best software mechanism to go with - 
LVM, md, something else?

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on my main machine, so I was looking at going 
with that on the new box as well. Alternatively, I wouldn't mind giving 
CentOS or Fedora a go - broaden the horizons and all that.

Any comments, either on the RAID or the distro choice, gratefully received.

TIA

Will.