> Say, I had 4 devices with 500 GB drives exported using iSCSI. If a > single larger server > took those four iSCSI export drives, and created one md RAID 5 device, > could a single > server be turned off, and just degrade the array until it was either > replaced entirely > or brought back online? > how long would it take to replicate and rebuild a volume across the LAN via iscsi? if each of those slices was 500GB, you'd be reading 3 x 500GB and writing 500GB before the drive was resynched. note, a single drive on each storage controller in this scenario won't even achieve 1gigE speeds.