WARNING: StripingYaST has no chance at this point to verify the correctness of your entries con-cerning striping. Any mistake made here is apparent only later when the LVMis implemented on disk.If you have already configured LVM on your system, the existing logical volumes canalso be used. Before continuing, assign appropriate mount points to these LVs, too.With Next, return to the YaST Expert Partitioner and finish your work there.15.3 Soft RAID ConfigurationThe purpose of RAID (redundant array of independent disks) is to combine severalhard disk partitions into one large virtual hard disk to optimize performance, data secu-rity, or both. Most RAID controllers use the SCSI protocol because it can address alarger number of hard disks in a more effective way than the IDE protocol and is moresuitable for parallel processing of commands. There are some RAID controllers thatsupport IDE or SATA hard disks. Soft RAID provides the advantages of RAID systemswithout the additional cost of hardware RAID controllers. However, this requires someCPU time and has memory requirements that make it unsuitable for real high perfor-mance computers.SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server offers the option of combining several hard disks intoone soft RAID system with the help. RAID implies several strategies for combiningseveral hard disks in a RAID system, each with different goals, advantages, and char-acteristics. These variations are commonly known as RAID levels.Common RAID levels are:RAID 0This level improves the performance of your data access by spreading out blocksof each file across multiple disk drives. Actually, this is not really a RAID, becauseit does not provide data backup, but the name RAID 0 for this type of system hasbecome the norm. With RAID 0, two or more hard disks are pooled together. Theperformance is very good, but the RAID system is destroyed and your data lost ifeven one hard disk fails.Advanced Disk Setup 241
