On Thu, Jun 29, 2006 at 11:24:25AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hello list! > I'm looking into buying hardware for a RAID5. The system I have spare is > an Athlon XP 2500, 1.5G memory, PCI-architecture, one fxp and one em > network cards. > > The system will be used for backing up my personal stuff (since age nine) > and for storing large amounts of data. > > > I've already read about RAIDframe in OpenBSD and want to use it. So far, > as I understood I now just need some SATA-Card(s) and three plus one spare > harddisks to get going.
RAID5 requires n+1 disks, where n is the number of disks you actually use; you can, if you really want, add some spares. Spares are used to rebuild the array if one disk fails; if a spare is not available when a disk fails, the array runs in degraded mode - i.e., it works, but it has no redundancy, any failed disk will lead to data loss. RAIDframe works quite well, but especially before -current, be careful about poking it - poking it too much used to lead to panics (I've had a couple of weird problems when first configuring the disk; for maximum security, a RAID set should be configured only once between reboots). Once it works, though, you'll be happy with it. I know I am. > My big problem is in selecting which SATA-Card (I've only used Dawicontrol > on OBSD) and if I should buy one with four ports or two with two ports. > > > What do you use in production? > Which aspects of the system need the most attention? I use a couple of very, very old disk off a double IDE controller. It works well, and has saved me from rebuilding my system twice (two disk crashes, yes they are *very* old). It's not fast, of course, but that was never a design goal. It *is* free (the disks were old spares and a couple of gifts), and *does* safeguard my data (in conjunction with good backups), which *was* the design goal. As to SATA cards, no clue. joachim