[clug] home RAID question

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

I plan to put together a RAID at home. I need to decide if
I should go with software raid or buy a proper raid controller.

I want the raid because I will not be able to back up this high
volume. So reliability is the number one parameter. I expect to
use raid 5, and I may have a hot spare or do raid 6.

My experience with software raid is that it generally worked,
but I had to have good understanding of how to manage it. Some
stuff was not well documented. The software was raw. Since then
mdadm was added which may do a better job - I did not get to use
it.

At the office, using PATA, we had a lot of IDE errors until we
moved to using a 3ware controller (with the same disks) and the
errors mostly went away. I never figured if this was an IDE
controller problem, IDE driver or cabling (unlikely, as we used
similar cables for the 3ware). I found this to be a common
problem at the time (this was 3-4 years ago). We did have tape
backups at the office which made it painful but not fatal.

Secondary requirements:
	- good performance. This will mostly be doing video
	  so it will at most need to handle 2-3 streams
	- flexibility: should be able to grow the raid and
	  grow the fs without losing the data, preferably
	  online
	- low CPU load (video will fully use the CPU)

I will probably use SATA (is this solid in current kernels?).

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au) <http://samba.org/eyal/>
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