Experiences w/ Software RAID 5 Under Linux? 541
MagnusDredd asks: "I am trying to build a large home drive array on the cheap. I have 8 Maxtor 250G Hard Drives that I got at Fry's Electronics for $120 apiece. I have an old 500Mhz machine that I can re-purpose to sit in the corner and serve files. I plan on running Slackware on the machine, there will be no X11, or much other than SMB, NFS, etc. I have worked with hardware arrays, but have no experience with software RAIDs. Since I am about to trust a bunch of files to this array (not only mine but I'm storing files for friends as well), I am concerned with reliability. How stable is the current RAID 5 support in Linux? How hard is it to rebuild an array? How well does the hot spare work? Will it rebuild using the spare automatically if it detects a drive has failed?"
Re:don't use ext2 (Score:4, Funny)
Use NFS...duh. (Score:5, Funny)
Here's what you do with those 8 fine drives of yours.
You'll need 9 486's. Get some sort of *nix on each one, preferably several different Linux variants and at least 2 BSD machines (I'd say more, but you know, netcraft confirms and all....) and get them all networked together. Put one drive each in 8 of the machines, format with the filesystem that's most convenient for the system on each box, and get an NFS server going serving that partition.
Then, on the ninth box, mount all the NFS shares and software RAID them.
Trust me. This is exactly what you want to do, and anybody who says different is a dumbass. People who point out what they will invariably say are "obvious shortcomings" of this setup are merely trolls, and not worth your time reading.