ALucas wrote:
With the coming of hardware RAID support in V2 I am tempted to go the RAID (1, 5, 1+0) route like many of you.
With RAID 1 it is clear that one is pretty well covered if a disk fails.
If the RAID card fails chances are that the disk is in a condition that can be mounted under a non-raid controller.
With RAID 5 and 1+0 however, should the RAID card fail it is not clear, probably unlikely, that the array can be rebuild on another same model card. This comes from my yesteryear(pre 2001) experiences with hardware RAID cards.
This may mean that by relying on a large array in RAID5 (and 10)will mean loss of all data unless there is another backup of the data somewhere else.
So if performance is not an issue I am tempted to not go to RAID 5 and invest on additional drives to go either RAID 1 or keep it simple and have a backup server with the same storage.
I would like to hear everyone's opinion on the validity of the above. Have hardware RAID cards changed that much to invalidate my justification?
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade and I must say that my experience is limited to other people's experience, but ...
On the various AV and home automation forums, I think that several people have run into hardware RAID card failulres where they lost the whole data set despite the expected redundancy/fault tolerance of the card.
IMHO, I can't help but to think that using two NAS Lite 2.0 server (especilly with the provision of RSYNC) replicating the data off-site would be a better backup/fault tolerance strategy than using a hardware RAID card. The added cost of the card would off set of the second server and address the need for a backup strategy.
Off course, that is only my opinion ...