Which RAID for a Personal Fileserver?

Dredd2Kad asks: "I'm tired of HD failures. I've suffered through a few of them. Even with backups, they are still a pain to recover from. I've got all fairly inexpensive but reliable hardware picked out, but I'm just not sure which RAID level to implement. My goals are to build a file server that can live through a drive failure with no loss of data, and will be easy to rebuild. Ideally, in the event of a failure, I'd just like to remove the bad hard drive and install a new one and be done with it. Is this possible? How many drives to I need to get this done, 2,4 or 5? What size should they be? I know when you implement RAID, your usable drive space is N% of the total drive space depending on the RAID level."

Comments

Software RAID?

[Suydam]

Have you thought about software RAID? Before everyone jumps down my throat, I realize that it's slower than hardware RAID...but, here is my rationale for using it:

1) You don't need drives that are the same size.
I've done hardware RAID, had a drive fail 2 years down the road and not been able to find an 18GB SCSI drive to re-insert to the array. That has the potential to jack your entire array. With software RAID, you buy a 36G drive, partition it so that 1 partition fits your array, and off you go

2) It's a personal file server, so speed is less important than cost (i'm guessing). With software RAID you can mix all sorts of wonderous things together. IDE drives from the basement, SCSI-320 drives you stole from work and nearly everything in between. It's for flexible, and has no associated controller cost.

3) It's easy as heck. You can configure it in Disk Druid/fdisk, and it works quite easily in any major distribution (I've done it in Slack, Debian, RH, Fedora and Mandrake).

The major downside is that you cannot (as least I don't know how to) hot-swap drives. But again, this is a personal file server. Spend your money on pizza and beer, screw the SCA hot-swap drives that are going to cost you an arm and a leg.

That's just my $0.02...flame away

Re:search the fscking google

[flacco]

I have had ZERO problems with my server quality SCSI drives that still have 2 years left on their 5 year warrenty.

there are two kinds of people: those who have had hard drive failures, and those that will have hard drive failures. i don't care if jesus h fucking christ himself blessed your hard drives.

I suggest looking at getting reliable drives before looking at a RAID solution.

and, if the poster is looking for the more-realtime-than-backup-restore reliability as he indicated, i suggest he look at raid BEFORE looking at drive quality.

the name of the game is redundancy. a RAID array of cheap drives (let's remember that it stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) *is* more likely to have a single hard drive failure - but it's recoverable. however, it's far less likely to have multiple, simultaneous drive failures on the same day (unrecoverable) than your one, expensive, better-quality hard drive is likely to have a single failure - which is unrecoverable.