On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 21:47 -0700, JD Gray wrote:
> I'm going to be purchasing some hard drives for a raid5 array. 
Better plan in a hotspare - the last batch of 160G disks I bought is
dying at an alarming rate.

> I'll be
> running them out of my gentoo fileserver. I've used md in the past for
> raid0, but I know it's not a very robust solution as far as partition
> resizing and the like. What do you suggest for a good raid solution?
linux md for raid5, with lvm if you want.
I get about 1% processor load on an athlon64 (and ~35% on a 500Mhz P3!)
at "full speed", it's really nice.

>  I
> haven't decided on an interface, though I'm seriously considering a
> buying a SATA controller and going with that, but I could also use the
> raid controller that's built on to my motherboard.
Nooooo! ;-)
Better use the linux md driver and use the disks directly. Less b0rkage,
more speed.
I've had quite good experiences with Promise TX2/TX4 controllers, but
opinions differ wildly on this thing.
>  Thanks in advance
> for the help. I think I want to go with software raid simply because I
> will be able to transfer the raid to another machine when I decided to
> upgrade that box.
And if something breaks you can replace it, even migrating the whole
array at once to another box (I did that, only needed a new kernel, but
after boot *plop* raid back)

I suggest you also think about failure-related problems - what if a disk
dies?
What if 4 out of 8 disks die within an hour? (I've seen that)

Hmmm ... I hope I'm not scaring you :-)
Good luck,

Patrick
-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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