[mythtv-users] RAID suggestions

[Robert Kulagowski]

> I'm sort of looking at a 3ware 7506-4LP but I hear the performance isn't 
> all that and its more for redudancy. 

I have one of these cards installed, and it works fine in a 4x250GB 
configuration.  Things to be aware of:  each drive is a master; there 
are 4 IDE cables coming off of the card, which presents challenges.  I 
have it in slot 6 of my motherboard, so it's at the bottom of the case, 
and it's tight down there.  Putting it in any of the other slots on the 
motherboard will eat at least one PCI slot just because of how much 
space the IDE cables take.  Even with rounded IDE, it's still not easy.

The card doesn't support online capacity expansion, so if you (I) ever 
decide that you want to go from 250GB to 400GB IDE drives I'd have to 
copy everything off first to external storage, build the array with the 
new drives, then copy everything back.  The speed of the card is 
perfectly fine for SD; I have 7 PVR-x50's writing to a central NFS mount.

Good things:  the card does everything in onboard hardware, so it 
doesn't task the host CPU with parity calculation.  It's configurable as 
a bootable device, so even my /boot partition is on the RAID-5.

Driver support from 3ware is good, and it has some nice web page-based 
administration software.