Re: Prepping to install: a different tangent

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sat, 13 Jun 2015 13:35:58 -0453
    From:        "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam%hiwaay.net@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <557C7697.3050906%hiwaay.net@localhost>

  | if I configured my RAID5 as 1 X 5 
  | X 1 (rows X cols X spares), would I have my 4 active drives, 1 parity 
  | drive & 1 spare ?

Yes.

  | I do have a spare 899.5 GiB partition (identical to 
  | the other 5) that I was going to use as /var, however I think my 16 GiB 
  | RAID1 root drive will be enough, so I could configure as asked, no ?

You could, but as a spare it isn't going to be very useful unless it
is on a different (physical) drive than the other 5 (otherwise, Murphy
guarantees that the drive that dies will be the one that also contains
the spare...)

But if it is a distinct drive, then doing that (and arranging to re-add
the spare after each reboot if you have auto-config on) might make
a lot of sense.

kre