[mythtv-users] Software RAID (was: Where are those new 1TB drives?)

[match at ece.utah.edu]

On 7 Mar 2007 at 22:08, Jim - MythTV wrote:

> 
> How well does software raid work? is it worth going with? I was hoping to setup a FreeNAS 
> server, I have an old external 10 drive bay cdrom tower that I was planning on putting in3 icy 
> docs (2x 5 drive and 1 x 3 drive version (13 drives total) (if I can find a reasonable place in canada 
> that sells em) Probably go with a few
> 5 750;s to start and fill the others as i get the cash :)
> 
> oh couse would have to get a couple 5 port sata cards.

Along time ago... In a galaxy far, far away... before the days of MythTV... 
before SATA... In the days when 20 gig hard drives ruled the day...

Wanting to build a server, I gathered all my old drives into one pile. The 
largest of which was 9 gig, most were 4 gig, the smallest was only 500 megs. 
I used software RAID to build one array. There were SCSI drives, SCSI II 
drives and IDE drives, enough for about 80 gigs total, which was a lot for the 
day. If I remember correctly, the CPU was a 350 MHz AMD chip, and the 
motherboard used a VIA chipset. I used this particular motherboard over the 
others I had because it had an extra IDE controller and would run a total of 8 
IDE devices. The SCSI controller was a Tekram.

I even did a write-up on this box, which floated around the web for a while.

I never had so much as a hickup in about 18 months, and I was never able to 
find a way to overload it. Course, that machine was not running MythTV... 
YMMV.

I can't speak for CPU overhead, and this particular box was probably not fast 
enough to act as a MythTV backend, but what I can attest to is that the 
software RAID code was rock-solid at that time, and this box worked a treat. I 
should think that unless the code has become broken since then, using 
modern SATA drives a software RAID NAS box should be just fine, as long 
as the rest of the hardware is well behaved.