RAID 10 = good choice.
I've worked a lot more with MyISAM, where OPTIMIZE TABLE does lock it
for the duration. I note that for InnoDB, OPTIMIZE TABLE is mapped to
ALTER TABLE, and so I expect it will be locked for the duration as
well. Perhaps someone else can confirm - all my InnoDB tables rig
I'd recommend RAID 10 - with 4 disks instead of 2, you'll roughly
double performance over RAID 1, both for reading and writing.
You might also look at 6 disks - 4 73's in RAID 10 for your data, plus
2 smaller, slower less expensive disks in RAID 1 (18 gb or 36 gb
maybe) for your boot disks.
As f
