[CentOS] Recommendations for a "real RAID" 1 card on Centos box

[Les Mikesell]

Therese Trudeau wrote:
>>> I have two home workstation machines.
>>> One is Centos, and one is Windows (the one I use Adobe on).  I'd prefer if possible
>>> to have the same type of RAID cards on both machines, because easier to
>>> manage and if I ever decide to sell or give away one machine, I can pull 
>>> the raid card and use it as a backup.
>> I've always considered this a huge advantage of software raid1.  Even if 
>>    everything on a machine melts except for one drive, you can recover 
>> the data from it and you don't need a special controller to do it.  On 
>> windows, you need the server versions to do mirroring, though.
>>
>> If you can tolerate losing an hour's work or so, you could just schedule 
>>   rsync commands to keep copies updated on another (perhaps external) 
>> drive or to another machine on the network - or get a Mac with it's 
>> 'time machine' backup.  This approach is actually safer than RAID alone, 
>> since operator or software errors will wipe out your mirrored copy 
>> instantly as well with RAID.
> 
> Unfortunately I can't use software RAID1 because of this:
> 
> http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096063.html

First, you should probably get your applications from a company that 
doesn't hate its customers... But aside from that, this restriction 
should only apply to the place where you install the app, not where you 
store your own work.  Why don't you ghost-image (or use the free and 
very nice clonezilla-live) your system disk for a quick bare-metal 
restore, and put your own work on a separate raid-mirrored partition? 
And since you seem to be very paranoid about your disks, use some other 
backup mechanism like rsync to another location at some frequent 
intervals too.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com