I’d appreciate a sanity check for what I’m planning to do later today.
I bought a minisforum um890 recently. It has 2 m.2 nvme ports. I have the system running nobara off one drive currently, the other is unfilled. The drive has file system encryption enabled.
I backed up the root folder of my system to a 128gb usb using backintime. I enabled encryption when asked.
I plan to install a second ssd, enable raid 0 striping on the 2 drives in bios, boot from a live USB, then install nobara onto the new raid storage.
After that, i should be able to reinstall backintime then restore my backup right?
sanity check
enable raid 0 striping
Sanity checked: You’re mad.
I’ve gotta ask, why RAID 0? I can’t think of a use case for that outside of very specific high IO applications in a server farm or something.
As far as I’m aware there’s currently no way to setup drives in RAID without wiping both of them.
I also haven’t tried encrypting my home/boot drive but normally if I want to make a complete backup of a drive I use Clonezilla. It’s saved my bacon many time including recently copying a HDD that was in the process of dying on me.
It might be easiest to just backup your home directory and reinstall Nobara to the drives after you’d set them up in RAID.
If your install is using LVM (which anything installed over a bit more than a decade should be) you can set up the new second drive as a RAID with a missing device, add it as additional PV, use pvmove to move all PEs to the RAID, remove the old PV, and now add that disk to the RAID.
Does that really work for RAID 0? Since RAID 0 is striped (with “zero” redundancy), I wouldn’t expect an array with a missing device to work at all. But I can’t say I’ve ever tried.
It should work - possible that it won’t let you create a one disk raid 0, but creating a one disk raid 1 and then converting it to a two disk raid 0 should word. It’s been years since I played with a pure raid 0 (don’t see much sense in them), but managed conversion back then.
Personally I would take this opportunity to segregate /home and / on two distinct SSDs. You can upgrade them separately in the future, optimize each of them for different purposes, you can fuff around with system partitions and trying new distros and whatnot without touching home etc.
There’s nothing outstanding to gain from RAID0 if you don’t need the increase in speed. You could make an argument for RAID1 but unless you actually need 100% availability, again, not worth the complications. Take frequent backups (preferably incremental) and that’s it.
Is “the bandwidth of a single nvme drive” actually a bottleneck for your application?
