Hi,<br> I'm looking for some suggestions and opinions on a decent way to setup the RAID on my backend. I'm looking to setup a decent amount of storage to record HD on my backend. I have one HD2000 pcHDTV PCI card and one HDHomerun unit to provide content. For storage I'm looking to go with five 500 gig SATA II drives. The dilemmas are software vs hardware RAID 5 and the total number of drives to utilize. I've read that software RAID is very mature and works well under Linux. I've only ever used Linux software RAID levels 0 and 1. If you recommend hardware RAID, what are the decent cards that don't cost an arm and a leg?
<br> My thought for software RAID 5 is to use five drives: three for the stripe, one for parity,and one hot spare to give me about 1.5 TB. Does software RAID work sufficiently well to take advantage of the hot spare? My other thought is to just use four drives with a hardware RAID card. Is that too much of a risk not having the hot spare? I'm leaning towards Seagate drives because they come with a 5 year warranty. I like the peace of mind of knowing that my array is covered for 5 years. My fear with going with a four drive hardware RAID is losing a second disk before the first disk has been replaced by Seagate. I could always use the five drive model even with hardware RAID.
<br><br>I'm anxious to hear what everyone thinks about my proposed setup. I'm going to send another email soon asking for recommendations on a motherboard for this backend. I'd like to order my parts in the next week or so and finally get going with Mythtv.
<br><br>Thanks in advance to all that respond,<br><br>David<br>