> What do others think > > = Raid done right by someone aware of the limitations makes a LOT of = sense. Raid done wrong can reduce your reliability while at the same = time lulling you into a false sense of security. I agree with him that fakeraid controllers are a bad idea, there is the = risk of some OS not detecting your drives are an array and doing bad = things because of that and there is the problem that products at that = end of the market typically do not come with good quality diagnostic and = repair tools. Real hardware raid controllers can be a good choice but you MUST keep an = identical spare and get familiar with the recovery procedures to the = point that you are confidant you can get the array up on the spare = controller without losing data before putting them into service. This is = especially true if you go for striping/parity based raid (with raid1 if = worst comes to worst you can probablly find software that will search = for the raw data on the drive and just ignore the raid headers). Linux software raid can also be a good choice, it's well engineered and = hardware independent, the downsides are you can't boot off it, you can't = use it for other operating systems and it probablly won't perform quite = as well as a real hardware raid controller (though for raid 1 there = probablly won't be much difference unless your system is IO bus = bandwidth starved). Also as drives get bigger the proabability of secondry failure during = rebuild is going up. So if you are going for a parity based raid it may = be more sensible to go for a more advanced parity system like raid6. You = might want to consider a hot spare as well if you can't gaurantee fast = drive replacements. Finally raid must be considered as an extra to not a substitute for = backup. While hard drive failure is a threat to your data there are many = other threats which raid does not protect against. I remember a story of a server with a moderate sized raid setup which = the owners thought meant they didn't have to backup. A psu fault put = mains on the DC rails and fried the controller boards on all the drives = at once. They got thier data back by using a data recovery firm but iirc = it cost them something like =A310000 . -- = http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist