Last week I was out of town and we had a bad electrical storm. My systems are on their own small UPSes, but that's more for short bursts, not sustained outages. Anyway, I ended up losing two systems. One apparently got something corrupted and would not boot, but I could get to the files through a rescue CD. Not a big deal since I wanted to move it to new hardware anyway. The other one had a WD 160GB hard drive fail. The good news it is under warranty. The bad news is it was part of a LVM with another 160 and 120 drive. So I'm going to have to rebuild the whole thing. It was running a couple important things, but mostly was used for backing up my mythtv recordings and videos, music, pictures, etc. So, on to my question. It's a real hassle to go through this when ATA/EIDE drives fail, and it seems like they fail a lot nowadays. I have quite a few of these drives so I'm not looking to purchase anything else, like SATA. So I'm wondering should I try doing some type of RAID5 with these drives? If so I'd want to put 4 of them in it, which then leads me to an installation issue since the CDROM would be removed. If I did RAID5 I would need to try and boot off a USB stick and do the install off NFS. Not sure if this system will even boot off USB. NFS install is not a problem. But am I helping myself all that much? I can't guarantee the power thing right now. I have some Belkin UPSes (F6H500-SER) but have yet to get them working with Linux. If I have a power failure while running RAID5 are may chances any better that it will come back up ok? I assume there's some type of notification to root if a drive fails? How difficult is it to replace it and have the array rebuild? Any sugestions or comments? Thanks, James
