Rudi Ahlers wrote: > I think my action plan now will be to figure out how to install CentOS > on a USB memory stick and make it boot on any machine (making it easy to > replace if need be), and then to play around with the RAID a bit and see > how well it works. Another option you may want to consider is a PATA->CF adapter. I use these for my OpenBSD firewalls and have them installed on 1GB CF cards. Performance should be better? Compatibility certainly is better, there's no way I could boot to USB off these aging P3-800 systems. The CF cards just show up as regular HDs I use these ($7): http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH Paired with Lexar CF cards. Not all CF is created equal, well maybe it is today. I found my Lexar CF cards were 5-10x faster than my Kingston cards of the same size, which surprised me. Not that I need high performance in firewalls that do no disk I/O but it was painful for the OS install to take hours(Kingston) instead of minutes(Lexar). Both pairs of CF cards are a few years old, today maybe everything out there is reasonably fast. At least with the above adapters be aware that those adapters above do stick up. I think a 2U chassis can fit them(I have tons of experience in supermicro systems). But no guarantees. You may need another adapter or perhaps a male to female IDE cable so that you can mount it another way in the chassis. I suppose you could even get two and run RAID. Just don't put your swap on the flash if you can avoid it. nate