usb flash drive - Linux partitioning scheme for Dell PowerEdge Server with 2x 2GB internal SD Card (RAID 1) and 10T SAS Raid 5

08
2014-07
  • Farshid Miri

    'm in the course of ordering a new Dell PowerEdge server to run XEN for virtualisation purposes on top of either Ubuntu or CentOS server. I'd like to put the OS on a flash drive to boot as fast as possible and the rest of data on a RAID disk. Dell internal SD flash drives are limited to 2 times 2GB and the second 2GB will be used for redundancy, hence only 2GB left for the OS. My question is, if I put /boot, /Proc and /Dev partitions on the SD flash and the rest on the RAID drive, would 2GB suffice and would it have a different performance than HDD?

    I know a good RAID (good means a lot of drives RAID together in e.g RAID 5), even with 7.2RPM disks, is fast enough, but due to security and availability reasons, I'd like to keep OS on a totally different physical drives with RAID 1.

    Any ideas?

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  • Questioner

    I'm trying to create partitions for a Slackware installation on my computer (beside Windows 7) just to have a nice distribution running mostly for school but when I run fdisk and print the partition table I get the following message:

    Partition x does not end on cylinder boundary.

    (In my case x = 1, just using x to help googlers.)

    I must say I'm using a RAID card (AMCC 3ware 9500S SATA RAID Controller). Maybe this is the problem.

    How can I fix this without losing any data?


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  • Neal

    I don't think you have a problem.

    If your partitioning tool is seeing the RAID array properly, the RAIDness of the disk being partitioned doesn't matter.

    I have heard that the actual layout of a modern disk is nothing like what is reported in the partitioning tool - so what is seen as a cylinder boundary in the partitioning tool probably isn't one anyway. The warning is just there for historical reasons.

    The reason for the warning stems from the fact that MS-DOS (I think, but may be wrong - it hasn't been very relevant for ages) needed partitions that started and ended on a cylinder boundary. Windows carried on the tradition of making sure that partitions started ended on a cylinder boundary for no reason, externally created partitions that didn't end on the boundary worked ok.