I've been running a RAID 0 with two WD Raptor 36 GB drives for the past 4 years. Neither has gone down and I've never lost anything. Sure, it could happen, but today's hard drives can withstand a lot. I do keep all my installation programs on an external hard drive (partly for portability, but mostly for a backup) and that drive has failed me before (which is why I have a backup for the backup).
Regardless, a raid 5 would give you the peace of mind that if one drive failed, you'd be okay. My dilemma with a card is that it's hard to find an onboard raid 5 chip. The card is still going to run through the PCI bus, so unless you pick up an PCIx board, you'll have limited bandwidth. I ran a raid card (intel processor, 16 mb ram, can't remember the manufacturer - DLC or DCI or something like that) with 5 scsi hdds on it. It was dog-slow, unless I did disk-to-disk operations (like copying or moving files, which the controller card took care of). Mark -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Josh Coates Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2006 11:06 AM To: 'Provo Linux Users Group Mailing List' Subject: RE: Home RAID question > > My first question is, is there a decent RAID 5 card within the $20, > > $80, and $120 range? i agree w/ gabe - go software raid5 for something like this. the only thing hardware raid5 will give you is a battery backed write cache for fast writes, which software can never give you (which is why software raid5 can be unsafe for database applications unless you writes are sync'd, which is slow like the lazy dog instead of fast like the quick rabbit.) of course, when you say "I am not too worried about loosing some files" then just do a raid0, but know that you *will* be hosed if you lose one disk. -josh > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf > Of Gabriel Gunderson > Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2006 10:47 AM > To: Provo Linux Users Group Mailing List > Subject: Re: Home RAID question > > On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 10:02 -0600, Kenneth Burgener wrote: > > My first question is, is there a decent RAID 5 card within the $20, > > $80, and $120 range? > > I actually prefer software raid to cheap hardware cards. At least you > know what you are getting into. I'd expect to pay more then any of > those for something decent. > > My 2 cents. > > -- > Gabriel Gunderson > http://gundy.org > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */ /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
