On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Simon <turne...@gmail.com> wrote: > I would recommend software raid. Because it's made by some great > folks in the linux community and it is a project in development (so > you can get lots of support and updates, though it is very stable and > is used in many prod systems).
I'm using software RAID5 (with SATA hard drives) for a couple years and -- without having any drive failures so far -- it seems to work well. I've got dmcrypt on top of it and performance is pretty transparent for the most part. Having core 2 duo helps, I guess. :) It was dead simple to set up, but I have (thankfully) not run into any drive failures so far. I should really prepare an off-line document with the recovery procedure should that happen. I'm not sure off the top of my head (other than pull bad drive, replace with new drive). In fact I need to make sure I know which drive is which! It has survived several crashes/power outages. For my RAID5 (four 500gb drives) it took about 90 minutes for the raid to verify after such incidents. I know there are benefits to hardware RAID but for low cost/low importance (it's my home PC) the software RAID is good enough for me.
