<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/25/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Greg Arena</b> <<a href="mailto:gma@gmadigitaldesign.com">gma@gmadigitaldesign.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"> I just recently bought a trio of 500 GB SATA hard disks<br>that I want to put together in a RAID 5 configuration for my
<br>MythTV box. These will only be used for storing recordings &<br>videos - I have an 80GB PATA drive in place that I'll keep there<br>for the OS, MythTV software, logs, etc. I plan to use Linux's<br>software RAID support - true hardware RAID was just too
<br>expensive.<br> I've heard mixed reports about using RAID 5 for media<br>stuff. The MythTV wiki doesn't recommend it without expensive<br>hardware RAID controllers, but yet I've heard people talking<br>
about their RAID 5 setups on this list and elsewhere. I was<br>wondering if anybody has gotten something similar working and<br>what settings they used (stripe size, etc.) since I've never set<br>up a RAID before. </blockquote>
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<div>Greg,</div>
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<div>I've been using RAID 5 for a year now with no problems. I started with 3x750GB SATA2 drives, and expanded the array to now have 4x750GB drives. Disk throughput has never been an issue for me - serving multiple frontends, and I've never noticed any meaningful CPU draw (it is running with a C2D Intel chip). My system disk is separate (as you are proposing).
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<div>My /proc/mdstat reports:</div>
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<div>Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]<br>md0 : active raid5 sde1[2] sdd1[1] sdc1[3] sdb1[0]<br> 2197715712 blocks level 5, 256k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]</div><br>Good luck,</div>
<div>Nick</div>