Having the OS on one disk means that a single disk failure will kill the machine. While you may have good backups it's always more convenient
if you can leave the machine running with a dead disk instead of having
to do an emergency hardware replacement job.
I've not tried Linux's software RAID for about 5 years now. How much does hotswapping a dead IDE drive kill the machine? Does this at all depend on the IDE controller or can most modern ones cope with the abuse?
Hardware RAID I've never worried about -- other than how much effort it took to get a HP/Compaq DL-360 and DL-380 running Debian. And I can't hotswap the drive while the machine's running -- put the new drive in and disk I/O completely locks up. During reboot/POST, the array starts to rebuild itself. There's a lot more relevant material when I Google for any fixes to this (certainly compared to the six months ago we set the boxes up), but I still can't get the array to rebuild itself while the box is up.
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Marek Isalski
Partner, http://www.faelix.net/
