Quoting David Wetzel (dave@turbocat.de):
> hi folks,
> 
> all my netbsd raid experience is some time ago with scsi (u2w) drives.
> 
> Now, I want to build an server for about 30 (office) clients. The main target is data safety and the second is speed. I want to start with:

First is security, second is speed...

Software RAID indicates that the first concern is cost, well above
security and speed.

Perhaps you'd ponder a SCSI based external RAID box.  Great for both
of these.  Terrible (CPU?) failure means you can plug in the RAID
to another machine and mount.

For production systems, I shy away from software RAID which requires
having config information that's on the boot system.  You lose the boot
system, you have to reproduce the information.  Which sucks.

An external RAID system which appears to be, say, a 400GB disk appears
that way on ANY system.

They aren't as cheap as software RAID, they usually outperform
software RAID (unless they came from Sun :).


> 2 120.0GB Seagate Barracuda ATA V drives, NetBSD RAID 1 software raid.
> 
> If the data amount will grow, I will add an el-cheapo PCI-EIDE controller card and add another 2 drives. 
> 
> Another option would be to go the "ICP Vortex way" but is that worth the money?
> An Pentium 4 > 2GHz should be able to do it in software fast enough I guess.
> 
> I want to be able to boot from any drive, if one fails. (I do not care if I have to add a small partition on each drive)
> 
> Any comments/real world expericences? The box will have gigabit lan (on Tyan Trinity GC-SL S2707) that should work with the "wm" driver?!