[mythtv-users] Where are those new 1TB drives?

[Brian Wood]

On Mar 10, 2007, at 5:03 PM, Melvin J. Cureton wrote:

>
>
> So is going to RAID easy?  and can you go with some IDE and some  
> SATA?  I always need more space (currently 1 350gig ide, and  
> 2x250gig ide in my be/fe) and i've been thinking about getting  
> HDHR, so need more space, and eventually would love to put every  
> DVD i own in myth, so have been debating a RAID, but i am tottally  
> clueless when it comes to that.  and is RAID5 the concensus best  
> choice?  And i see discussion on software/hardware.  Do you still  
> need a controlling RAID5 card, or if you just get a SATA card/mobo  
> to attach drives too, linux has software to handle it all?  And for  
> apearance sake i don't want a huge tower in the living room, so  
> would i have to separate the BE to my basement into a huge tower?   
> I apologize for my ignorance in this area.  I just want as much  
> info as i can get before i do it.
>

As has been discussed here a lot lately, Linux software RAID is quite  
good. The only possible problem I can see is that such an array can't  
be read by a Windows machine, but that doesn't matter to me at all.  
Software RAID can be done with no extra hardware beyond the drive  
interfaces on your motherboard. If you need more drives an  
inexpensive SATA or PATA card will do fine, no need for expensive  
hardware RAID controllers.

RAID5 is a good compromise between redundancy and capacity. It does  
have a bit more overhead than RAID0 or RAID1 but that's really not a  
problem with any machine made in the last decade. You need a minimum  
of 3 same-size drives (or at least same-size partitions), so with the  
drives you describe you would use both 250s and a 250GB partition on  
the 350 for a total of 500GB storage. That leaves some left on the  
350 for an operating system, swap, and possibly a boot partition.

Never apologize for ignorance, the only ones who should apologize are  
the ones who don't want to learn.
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