PUBLIC MARKS with tags debian & raid

Our intention is not to build a fail-safe system nor a HA-Linux. We are just using RAID-1 mirrored disks to make sure that the system can be restored easily if 1 disk crashes. The following has been tested only twice (hey, we've got other things to do). It did work for us, it might work for you. It might also make your rats go berserk or just blow your mind.

A RAID device is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. The concept was developed in 1987 at UC Berkeley and involves the creation of a virtual disk from multiple small disks in order to deliver improved performance and reliability. There are many flavors of RAID and lots of variations in how to implement it. We detail here a specific instance we use: software RAID1 using IDE disks on a Dell PowerEdge box running Debian "sarge" loaded with grub, managed by mdadm, using the ext3 journaling file system.

The system is equipped with 2 similar hard disks (they do not have to be the same but it helps if they are at least similar). The first disk is attached to the primary IDE as master, it will be referenced as /dev/hda. The second disk is attached to the secondary IDE also as master, it will be referenced as /dev/hdc.

Replacing A Failed Hard Drive In A Software RAID1 Array | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

Interesting way to monitor Raid 5 of PE 2650 running under debian using the dell afacli tool.