On Wed, 2011-08-31 at 19:59 -0400, Peter Johansson wrote: > On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 7:51 PM, M.L. wrote: >=20 > > The OP didn't want RAID either, which is confusing to me when storing > > a large amount of data. >=20 > I'm assuming the OP was going to go with software RAID. Cheap > hardware RAID is EVIL and should be avoided like the plague. There is no "cheap" hardware RAID. What is labelled as "cheap" hardware RAID is actually just a few BIOS hooks that allow an OS to more easily ID a series of drives as an array and implement software RAID accordingly. I worked a bit setting up one of these "cheap" hardware RAID setups, it was indeed a nightmare. Ended up getting rid of it all (not easy) and setting up a "normal" software RAID. Didn't end up liking that (stability issues), so we bought a real hardware RAID card. Has worked flawlessly and effortless ever since. Note this wasn't just mirroring RAID, nothing special. The way to tell a "cheap" hardware RAID card and a real RAID card is how the OS detects things. If you configure the array in the cards BIOS and the OS still sees single drives in the hardware detection portion of things it's NOT a real RAID. A real RAID card will present to the BIOS a single device per array. TTYL --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .