RAID questions (was Re: [TriLUG] Re: Dieing hard drive?)

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Tanner Lovelace wrote:

>While we're talking about RAID what version of RAID would people 
>suggest?
>
IMHYAO, Raid 5 is only a good choice if you are using a large number of 
drives, and can incorporate a hot spare or two - or if you really can't 
afford to sacrifice 50% of the capacity of the purchased drives.

>Also, should I consider getting a "$20 IDE RAID controller" or just
>use software RAID?
>  
>
I'd generally suggest the controller.  The advantage being that it gives 
you another set of IDE channels to attach those drives to (as you may 
need them since they is not going to be your only disks).  It also 
pretty-much ensures that you're going to have hot-swappable channels, 
which is a nice feature in a RAID setup, given that one of the main 
purposes of RAID is to keep things up and running should a disk die.  
Another consideration in the RAID 5 vs mirroring debate is that most 
cheap RAID cards can't do RAID 5, and it is a larger software hit to do 
the checksumming and other processing on the host system.

Aaron S. Joyner