Boris Epstein wrote: > You surely do have a point there. However, it is still not all that > likely that a disk will fail during the rebuild time in question (what > are we talking? some hours max?) > 8 disks is about the upper limit I'd suggest for a single raid group on any sort of system. rebuilding a 8x1.5TB raid5 could easily take a full day or more.... will you have an online hotspare? if not, then the rebuild time includes how long it takes you to realize there's a bad drive, procure and install the replacement, /AND/ the umpteen hours for the rebuild. personally, I prefer using raid10 or 1+0 (more or less the same thing), and for anything above a 2 disk mirror, I prefer to use a proper hardware raid controller... for 8+ disks, I'd likely be looking at external storage arrays such as the IBM DS3000 family.