So now that I'm going down the path of building a new media storage server, I need to look at options for preserving the data. I think I'm going to not go with a traditional RAID system because your data is striped across multiple drives - any one drive essentially has gibberish on it.
The two other options are unRAID and FlexRAID. Both are similar in that the data is stored on individual drives and then a parity is made on another device. So if you have multiple drive failures, at worst your data on the remaining drives is ok. And they are also much more flexible with regard to adding drives, configuring the number of parity drives, and using drives of multiple sizes. The difference is that unRAID is Linux-based and boots from a USB stick, while FlexRAID is basically software running on a host OS. I am leaning towards FlexRAID, mainly because I am not very familiar with Linux and I need this box to do more than just store media. Has anyone used either unRAID or FlexRAID? Your experiences? --- Brian
