[Splitting.Heads]

That's from 2004 though so possibly IDE drives or SATA1. What about the SP box running SATA2 drives nice & fast and the overall system performance? Would XP performance even compare with Ubuntu as well, I'd be taking the Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 OS option.

[Andy]

A quick google found this: http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=149

If you scroll to the bottom it suggests that a single drive is slower than a software RAID'ed setup. So its actually faster than using the drives separately.

[Splitting.Heads]

What accounts for a fair amount though this is what I'm curious about. I'm going to dump nearly 3TB worth of data and setup FreeNX to connect to the box. I don't expect to use it to encode home videos or anything but I am curious about the nett effect of it and how it'll feel when I connect or update backups etc.

[Andy]

Thanks, on a box like SuperPlan Storage what sort of performance issues would you expect to see running software RAID5 though? 1-2% or like +20%? I got people telling me it's going to be rather noticeable.

It is a fair amount but since its only a storage box I imagine performance shouldn't be that much of an issue. As long as you can reach the 100Mbps connection speed then any more is a bonus, yes?

[Splitting.Heads]

Thanks, on a box like SuperPlan Storage what sort of performance issues would you expect to see running software RAID5 though? 1-2% or like +20%? I got people telling me it's going to be rather noticeable.

[Andy]

RAID5 at a hardware level is a very expensive option. However even in software mode, its still got better redundancy than other RAID options. With RAID5, you can lose any single drive, yet your data is safe. Simply replace it and rebuild the array to restore your redundancy. RAID6 is the same but any two drives can fail without data loss.

[Splitting.Heads]

So I've been reading for the past week and I got my eye on the SP Storage dedicated server http://www.ovh.co.uk/individual/prod...an_storage.xml and a friend has recently got one as well. He's just experienced a HDD failure though and seeing as he had RAID0 he's lost all the data.

So now I've been reading and trying to figure out how I can get better RAID redundancy without RAID1 taking half the disk space.

I have read the RAID wikipedia entry and I can see the server offers RAID 0/1. I've searched the forums and found http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1333

The "Storage" servers were designed and optimized to the need of critical storage with a safety choice: with or without raid 0, 1, 5, 6, 10. And a Security and safety choice: Raid 0, 1, 5, 6, 10.

So are my only options for Raid 5, 6 & 10 through software configuration? I've never setup RAID before but I've got people telling me software RAID isn't very good and software RAID 5 (which wouldn't cut my HDD space back very much compared to RAID 1) is very resource hungry.

Is there no way to have RAID 5 setup at the hardware level and if so is it still just as much of a drain on the server as software RAID?