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WARNING: Striping
YaST has no chance at this point to verify the correctness of your entries con-
cerning striping. Any mistake made here is apparent only later when the LVM
is implemented on disk.
If you have already configured LVM on your system, the existing logical volumes can
also be used. Before continuing, assign appropriate mount points to these LVs, too.
With Next, return to the YaST Expert Partitioner and finish your work there.
15.3 Soft RAID Configuration
The purpose of RAID (redundant array of independent disks) is to combine several
hard disk partitions into one large virtual hard disk to optimize performance, data secu-
rity, or both. Most RAID controllers use the SCSI protocol because it can address a
larger number of hard disks in a more effective way than the IDE protocol and is more
suitable for parallel processing of commands. There are some RAID controllers that
support IDE or SATA hard disks. Soft RAID provides the advantages of RAID systems
without the additional cost of hardware RAID controllers. However, this requires some
CPU time and has memory requirements that make it unsuitable for real high perfor-
mance computers.
SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server offers the option of combining several hard disks into
one soft RAID system with the help. RAID implies several strategies for combining
several hard disks in a RAID system, each with different goals, advantages, and char-
acteristics. These variations are commonly known as RAID levels.
Common RAID levels are:
RAID 0
This level improves the performance of your data access by spreading out blocks
of each file across multiple disk drives. Actually, this is not really a RAID, because
it does not provide data backup, but the name RAID 0 for this type of system has
become the norm. With RAID 0, two or more hard disks are pooled together. The
performance is very good, but the RAID system is destroyed and your data lost if
even one hard disk fails.
Advanced Disk Setup
241
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