Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Arcturius
I wouldn't say it's overy complex...but it _can_ be costly, in certain cases.
This appears to be a fairly decent primer...
It appears that you're simply tired of making backups, and want to be able to recover from a disk failure, without too much effort.
To really give good advice, we'll need to know how much data you have, and how much storage space you plan to require in the next few years. Also, what are your performance requirements, and most importantly: your budget. 
If you want to maximize capacity while keeping decent performance, I would recommend a RAID5 array, but it requires a minimum of three disks. In the IDE world, the controllers tend to be overly expensive. For SCSI, the controllers are cheaper, but disks are more spendy.
I am a fan of RAID1, because it doubles the effective reliability of a standalone disk, requires a minimum of only two disks, and boosts read performance. |
actually, i wouldn't really say it's that expensive anymore for the controllers. from what i hear, both highpoint and promise have good ide-raid solutions.
highpoint's entries include the rocket raid 454, which will do raid 5 for up to 8 drives, and runs about $95.
promise is a little more expensive, like the sx4000 at around $150 (4 drive) and the sx6000 (6 drive) at about $250. both units however have onboard memory (pc133), and seem to be a little bit better with raid 5 due to better onboard hardware.
apparently highpoint has fixed their raid 5 woes on their devices, and the hpt374 chip is natively supported by freebsd.
just my $.02
edit: i probably wouldn't be using a highpoint raid 5 setup in the same machine, i would use it in a dedicated fileserver - highpoint cards use more cpu power to do its duties, whereas i _believe_ the promise units are basically all on-board.