Nigel kendrick wrote: >>If it was me (and it isn't), I probably would have set up the 3 disks in a >> >> >RAID5 array. That way, you can lose one disk and the system still hums >along until you can replace the failed disk. > > >That was considered at the time but we found that any combination of >mirroring using the motherboard-based controller and the plugged in one >wasn't stable (unbootable or soon locked-up) - the only way we could get >mirroring to work was if both drives were on the 8212-based controller. Time >and budget were against us at the time we were building the original system, >but later work with CentOS4 and that controller on other systems was much >more successful. > > In the face of all that trouble, I guess my next question would be "Did you soldier on with the troublesome chipset because you had to (for budget or other reasons?) or you just didn't have the time to source out a dedicated RAID card? I guess I'm having trouble understanding the rationale behind going to all that trouble to mirror the data, but not doing the same for the OS....when you can do both at the same time with RAID5. Having the data intact is nice, but having intact data on a dead server isn't terribly useful. 8-) Fortunately, these controllers are becoming quite cheap and disk space is practically free compared to what it cost even a few years ago. I remember having to spend "a small fortune" about 15 years ago for a 1gig disk so I could keep a week's worth of a full Usenet feed on my news server. 8-) Cheers,