hardware question [2]: SATA RAID

[Kent Borg]

On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 11:17:26AM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> SO I'm going to put two 300-gig SATA drives in my new system, and I'm trying
> to decide whether or not to use RAID in them.  I guess RAID 0 (striped)
> seems too risky, 

Raid 0 is good for fast, big scratch space for things like video
editing.

> while RAID 1 (mirror) seems like a tremendous waste of space...

Stop to think how big 300 GB really is.  ...  Yes, *that* big.  Also
stop to remember what your data is worth, and what your time is worth
installing things and getting them set up, and what is it worth not
having things crash on you because of a disk failure.

Consider putting *everything* on raid 1.  If you put your swap there
you can even keep running through a disk failure.

> less essential partitions (/music, /videos) striped.

Rather than striped, maybe just plain partitions; same capacity, more
reliable.  But where did your music and videos come from?  Did you
feed a bunch of CDs and DVDs through your computer?  Do you really
want to do that again if there is a glitch in either disk?

OK, a stack of DVDs are a lot of data, even in these 300-GB-disk-days,
maybe don't raid 1 them, but maybe raid 1 everything else.

[If you really need a lot of space, then a few disks more and raid 5
will give you pretty good redundancy, and not waste too much space.
How many DVDs could a 5-disk raid 5 array of 300 GB drives hold (4*300
GB, or 1.2 TB of space)?]


-kb, the Kent who is a big fan of Linux software raid.