RAITD (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Thumb Drives)

During yesterday’s RHCE class, Lee used a powered USB hub and some cheap USB thumb drives to construct a software RAID array. This seemed like a pretty cool (and inexpensive) way to build a software RAID without destroying my ThinkPad. It wouldn’t do me any good to disable my ThinkPad before the RHCE exam, now would it? I found a USB hub and some 512MB thumb drives at Staples. The drives were only $10 each, so this was a much lower barrier to entry than an enterprise attached storage solution. Once I had the thumb drives connected I created some partitions of type fd (Linux raid autodetect). I then created the RAID 1 devices with mdadm. Once those were in place I created LVM pvs, vgs, and lvs. Last came the ext3 filesystems. The beauty of this setup is I now have a safe place to test things. And it’s just too hilarious, you know?