[CentOS] 4 X 500 gb drives - best software raid config for a backup server?

[Ian Forde]

On Sat, 2009-02-21 at 17:24 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Ian Forde wrote:
> > Might not be a bad idea to see how they're able to use
> > mdadm to detect and autosync drives.  I don't *ever* want to go through
> > something like:
> > 
> > http://kev.coolcavemen.com/2008/07/heroic-journey-to-raid-5-data-recovery/
> > 
> > Not when a little planning can help me skip it... ;)
> 
> If you are really concerned about data recovery and can chunk up your 
> filesystem mount points so things fit on a single disk (usually not too 
> hard with 1 or 1.5 TB drives available now) just use software raid1 
> since you can simply mount any single disk from it and access the files. 
>   It becomes much more difficult with other raid levels or multi-disk lvm.

My point is that at home, I'd rather do network mounts to a fileserver
utilizing HW RAID.  At work, I'd rather use HW RAID with hot-swap disks.
This way, there's are no hoops to go through.  Time is a more important
resource to me... SW RAID is a path that I went down well over a decade
ago in Solaris (DiskSuite and Veritas VM), followed by Linux mdadm.  If
you've ever had to do a Veritas encapsulated boot disk recovery, you'll
know why I'd rather never go down that road *ever again*... ;)

	-I

	-I