[mythtv-users] RAID suggestions?

[Greg Arena]

	I just recently bought a trio of 500 GB SATA hard disks
that I want to put together in a RAID 5 configuration for my
MythTV box. These will only be used for storing recordings &
videos - I have an 80GB PATA drive in place that I'll keep there
for the OS, MythTV software, logs, etc. I plan to use Linux's
software RAID support - true hardware RAID was just too
expensive.
	I've heard mixed reports about using RAID 5 for media
stuff. The MythTV wiki doesn't recommend it without expensive
hardware RAID controllers, but yet I've heard people talking
about their RAID 5 setups on this list and elsewhere. I was
wondering if anybody has gotten something similar working and
what settings they used (stripe size, etc.) since I've never set
up a RAID before. I've already run some benchmarks using bonnie++
with one drive by itself to use for comparison after setting up
the RAID to try to make sure it's not going to degrade
performance excessively. I'm willing to spring for another hard
disk to go to a four-disk RAID 10 configuration if RAID 5 looks
like it'll be too slow.
	I'm also considering using XFS for the file system for
storing all the media files on this RAID. Any suggestions on how
to optimize it for RAID 5 or RAID 10? I've never used anything
but ext3 for my Linux boxes until now, so I'm new to XFS as well.
	Of course, since I'm new to RAID and XFS, I'm not going
to put the RAID online until I'm sure it'll perform well and
reliably - I definitely plan to experiment before I shift the
handful of recordings & videos I've squeezed onto my current Myth
partition over to the new RAID.

Thanks,
Greg A.