Any Raid Experts?

[sknight]

I am planning to build a new computer and I wanted to get some advice on Raid5 and Raid 1+0.

Raid doesn't guarantee your data integrity. It doesn't detect silent data corruption for instance.
At present the best solution to preserve your data is to use ZFS as filesystem. It's available for Solaris, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD and Linux (in user space only - kernel module version still under development).

To have an idea of ZFS benefits take a look at this article: http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/01/home-server-raid-greed-and-why-mirroring-still-best

There are a lot of other interesting documents about ZFS on the web...

[sknight]

I found another nice step by step guide for you on how to setup a Home Fileserver using ZFS: http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

Take a special look at the chapters 2 and 3 where the author compares the existing products and explains why ZFS is the best solution nowadays.

If you want to be serious forget RAID (mainly on Windows)...

[sknight]

What about ReiserFS - I heard is was a killer filesystem.

AFAIK Reiser FS doesn't have all the benefits of ZFS. BTR is the only filesystem with the same ZFS characteristics  but it's not ready yet (or better saying, tested enough).



As for the killer filesystem statement, that's the explanation:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/08/body_found_reiser/

[sknight]

@sknight, ZFS ?  Ur kidding me.  With ZFS (pooled) you don't know the impact of a drive failure as you dont know which drive has which data.  Very handy.  Thats why Symantec(Veritas) make so much money on Sun.

No, you are kidding me! You don't need to know where your data is. You just need to know which drive has a failure in order to replace it... ZFS shows clearly which drive has checksum errors. Then you just need to replace the disk.

Take a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGIwg6ye1gE

Two drives are literally destroyed during a live demonstration with no data loss. Try that with RAID-5! :-)

This video is very interesting too and shows how zfs detects silent data corruption (something that RAID doesn't!!!):

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/selfheal