Brett Serkez spake the following on 9/14/2006 5:04 AM:
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I would highly advise simply paying the money for a RAID Controller card to handle all of this for you. You mentioned that you do not have physical access to the server, so the Raid card can easily handle hdd failures and send you an email letting you know that you need to replace the other drive.
That's actually a very good point. The only thing is that the machine doesn't generate any revenue and so it'll heavlily depend on the price of the RAID controler really...
Run software RAID without a hardware controller. I have running Linux servers with identical hard drives using the kernel's software RAID support on production servers. Since you already have the two drives, it is a no cost approach, simply configure the software RAID in disk druid during install and off you go. If you are concerned about monitoring, write a cron job to check the contents of /proc/mdstat periodically.
Mdadm can be set to e-mail any failures to the sysadmin. http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2002/12/05/RAID.html