Re: [PLUG] I need help with configuring Raid on Ubuntu server 20.04

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 9:48 AM H Mottaleb via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> I’m confused after reading the comments about advise against the use of the RAID in the BIOS in the event the motherboard fails.
>
> What is the difference between the two and would I be able to configure the software raid without setting up the hardware or vice-versa? Should I not configure the raid settings in the bios and run the bash script as Rich stated?
>

So, based on your private email you're a little new to all of this,
and so this might feel a bit like diving into the deep end.  There are
advocates of both, but I suspect more in favor of software RAID here.
When all is working fine there are no problems with either, and if
anything hardware has some advantages IF you have battery backup, and
it might even be a bit faster with a decent card.  The issue is that
it is usually less flexible if you want to reconfigure things later,
and if that card ever dies then your drives are useless unless you
obtain a compatible card.  Software RAID is more flexible and the same
drives are readable on any hardware (you could attach them all to a
Raspberry Pi somehow and still read them).

If you wanted to use software RAID then you'd need to configure the
hardware RAID card to just expose the drives to the OS directly.
Ideally this is just as a raw drive pass-through (sometimes called IT
mode), but some cards don't support this and you'd expose them as a
bunch of single-drive volumes.  That approach might make the drives
harder to read without the card, but would maintain the flexibility
aspect.

If you want to use hardware RAID then you just configure it on the
card and the OS just sees whatever drives you have the card configured
to present as if they were physical drives.  At that point the OS part
is the same as a non-OS install.

You mentioned starting over in email.  If you do that, I'd suggest
getting a screenshot of your RAID config in hardware, and also get a
screenshot of what the partitioning screen looks like.  Then once your
OS is set up before you spend a lot of time messing around with your
application just run df/lvs/pvs/vgs/blkid and just get a sense of what
you're working with.  Then set up any mounts the way you want them
before you go installing software so that everything doesn't end up on
root if you don't want it there.  You probably could also configure
Ubuntu to give you a really big root - that isn't a best practice but
it would work.

-- 
Rich
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