Fake-RAID annoyances

[smolloy]

So after a lot of searching, and help from people on these forums, I have discovered that the "hardware" RAID on my new motherboard is, in fact, no such thing. It is a fake-RAID that it configured through the BIOS to fool you into thinking that you have a hardware RAID.

Ideas to get around this,
1/ Drop the idea of having RAID 0, and be happy with two SATA II drives. They should be fast enough.
2/ Buy a small hdd to use as a boot drive. Put only the necessary partitions onto this drive, and keep everything else on the fake-RAID.

I am going to go with option 1.

Questions:
1/ I would like to hear if option 2 is possible, and, if so, what would I have to put onto the boot hdd? Obviously /boot would have to be there, but what about /etc? Would everything have to go there except for /home?
2/ Are there any other options I have neglected?

[smolloy]

What I ended up doing was to make a /boot and a swap partition at the start of one of my 250GB drives, and then use LVM to make one big group out of the rest, plus the entire second 250GB drive. I then partitioned this between /home and /.

The other two 250GB drives I have -- which I intended as the mirror part of my RAID 0+1 -- will be used as a more standard backup. At least now they'll be safe from accidental rm -rf * !!!

BTW: I'm writing this from my single boot SUSE64 10.1 machine. My first single boot Linux experience! The training wheels are now off!!!

[bigtomrodney]

I used to have 4x20GB drives, and I used one for boot and root partitions, and the other three were in a RAID 5. I actually use LVM and have a root partition plus a 500GB /home over the remainder of the two 320GB drives. Works well, if a disk goes you just lose what's on that disk. There's no parity but it keeps losses to a minimum.