Hey everyone, happy new year.
Basically, I have one 60GB SSD (bought when SSDs were still quite pricey) and two 250GB hard drives leaving a total of three which I find painful to manage especially when programs (like virtual box) only want to work with files on the main drive being my SSD. So, would it be possible for me to raid all of my drives together so I have in theory just 'one' drive.
N.B. I am using ubuntu as my OS, no partitions. I am not looking for speed just to combine my drives together reliably.
Which RAID should I use and would I need a raid card?
Thank you for your time
You can use AUFS to have the disks presented as a single pool of data. You don't have to set up RAID or reformat or anything like that and the drives will still function independently.
If you want to give it a try you can look up a guide but this is how I have it set up for my pool.
First you'll need to create a mount point, so for the purpose of this you can make it in your home directory: /home/user/pool
you may also need to install aufs-utils or aufs-tools or something like that (don't remember)
then the command to mount it will be like this:
mount -t aufs -o br:/path/to/disk1=rw:/path/to/disk2=rw:/path/to/disk3=rw,sum,ubda=reval,create=mfs none /home/user/pool
where /path/to/disk is the mount point or partition that you want to use. These mount options will spread new files evenly across the disks based on how much free space there is, but you can change the options if you want to use something else, have a look at the man page.
If you do try this I would suggest that you leave your system folders on the ssd and just add /home or whatever to the pool, but you will need to make sure that the pool is mounted on boot so you'll want to add it to your /etc/fstab file.
Thank you, I will try this out.
What I would do is create a directory on your root partition called /ssd and copy the contents of your home directory there. Then delete the contents of your actual home folder and use AUFS to mount /ssd, hdd1 and hdd2 (whatever the mount points are) to /home/user. That way your home directory will be pooled across the three disks. But be careful setting this up and make sure you add it to fstab before rebooting.
In the fstab you will add it like this:
none /home/user aufs br:/ssd=rw:/hdd1=rw:/hdd2=rw,sum,ubda=reval,create=mfs 0 0
Pretty sure that will work, if anything goes too wrong you can just copy your home folder stuff back.