I am new to RAID and I want to setup up a RAID-5 on my Ubuntu 10.04 sysatem. I have the kernel installed on a partition of a 500 GB disk. Then, I have another partition of FAT32 on the other half like so (fdisk -l
output):
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 30395 244140032 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 30395 31002 4881409 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 31003 60801 239360467+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda5 30395 31002 4881408 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Due to money restrictions, I can only afford one more 1 TB drive. My thinking is, create 2 or more partitions on this 1 TB drive and then use these as array components for the RAID-5. Will this work? I would have something like this:
/dev/sda3
= partition 1 for RAID
/dev/sdb1
= partition 2 for RAID
/dev/sdb2
= partition 3 for RAID
/dev/sdb3
= partition 4 for RAID
Will this work or do I actually need 3, 4, etc physical hard drives for a proper RAID-5 array?
EDIT - Thanks for all the answers. I really hadn't considered losing multiple partitions on one drive with failure. That makes sense, though... I think I am going to get a 1 TB drive and then just use it as storage and purchase another drive for RAID-5 as soon as I can afford it.