There is an old phrase about wearing a belt and a pair of suspenders if you want to make sure your pants stay up (why haven’t plumbers figured that out?). The point of the phrase is that if you want to be sure that your plans will happen you should have a backup plan as well. In the case of file systems this is literally the truth. If you want to make sure you don’t lose any data, do backups as well as provide some other form of data protection. That something else for data protection is RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks).
This article is a brief introduction to software RAID, which is really md (Multiple Device Driver) for Linux. As with the article on LVM, this article is just a quick introduction and not a deep tutorial. The intent is to quickly demonstrate Linux software RAID using md and mdadm. Perhaps this article will show you how easy it is to add software RAID to your repertoire to either help improve performance or provide extra protection. In essence, this article will introduce you to Linux software RAID becoming the ‚Äúsuspenders‚Äù to the ‚Äúbelt‚Äù of backups…
Article Source Linux Magazine
August 19, 2009, 6:53 am 
