[mythtvnz] Myth & Raid. SW or HW..

[James Booth]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2012 20:42:27 Johan Schuld wrote:

Hi All,


A while back the HD on my mythbox died and had to replace it with an old 
250Gig ATA drive I had lying around. Not the best option with HD recordings 
etc.


So, as HD will inevitably die, my plan is to buy some new HD's and put them in 
a RAID array. Thinking RAID1 as I currently don't have the funds to buy more 
than 2 drives. 


I've done quite some research so far about the options and wondered what the 
easiest and most reliable solution. I.e. I know people having a HW Raid using 
a Dell Perc 5/i card. These are so common they can be picked up for less than 
$100NZ inc shipping from ebay and with some SAS to SATA cables they run fine 
with SATA drives.  A cheaper option would obviously be SW Raid, but not that 
much cheaper. 


Regardless of SW or HW, I'm thinking of 2x 2TB drives, in Raid1. I've been 
looking at the WD Green ones as they are competitively priced and silent (pc 
is under the TV). That drive has been discussed many times here so I am aware 
that they might have issues in SW raid, I'm just still looking at a similar 
drive from another vendor. 


As Raid1 is really not that much overhead, should I just not bother with HW 
raid, and let linux do the job? (Opensuse 12.1) . Can I transfer a already 
existing non-raid install to a SW raid1 config? For now I'll run the OS and 
media storage on one raid volume, I might split that out later when I can 
afford some more drives. 


I can find quite some info about Raid, but not so much in combination with 
Myth.. don't want to do stuff that's overkill, but like to have stuff that 
works (particulary when one drive fails ;) 


Cheers
J.


I run 2 x RAID1 (4 disks total) using software RAID. System disk is separate 
again. I recently had my first disk failure, it was a low-level interface 
failure and system would not even boot with the disk connected. Just 
disconnected the faulty disk and was back into business with the mirror. While 
I waited for my warranty replacement disk I did an upgrade from 11.04 to 12.04 
and myth 0.25. When the disk arrived I just threw it in, added it to the 
array, and away we went. Definitely worth doing RAID, but I should probably 
have gone for RAID5 as it would be much easier to add capacity.
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