[CentOS] RAIDs and JBOD?

Tue Nov 10 21:26:37 UTC 2009
James Bensley <jwbensley at gmail.com>

Hey Guys,

I have some questions regarding a new home server I am going to build
in the hopefully very near future (ASAP, I just need to finish
planning everything and this is the penultimate hurdle), I will be
creating a software RAID...

Lets say I have three drives "knocking" around which are all 1TB SATA
II drives but each made by a different manufacturer. I am going to
guess that these couldn't be used in a RAID 5? Or could they?

However could a similar result of 2TBs of data with redundancy be
achieved with JBOD?

Also regarding RAID 5, three drives of data to one for parity is the
max ratio I believe? I.e. to expand this by adding another data drive,
the original parity drive would no longer cover this and another would
be required, is this correct?

One more question about hot swappable drives, I understand that you
can create RAID arrays with and without hot swappable drives but I am
confused by this concept. I'm my experience with RAIDs I have only
every delt with a RAID 1 that has degraded. I simply set the drive as
offline, replaced it, set it to online and the RAID rebuilt itself all
without restart the server and operation was never interrupted. So we
can presume the server had hot swappable drives enabled yes? (It was a
hardware RAID). With a software RAID is this still achievable?

Thank you for reading.

Regards,
James ;)

Charles de Gaulle  - "The better I get to know men, the more I find
myself loving dogs."