[K12OSN] Knowledge turned crisis

[Liam Marshall]

I started out asking a week or so ago about eide drives with raid 
configuration question out of curiosity for future expenditure. 

This morning as I was teaching a lesson the server let out a weird, 
mechanical noise albiet only for a few seconds.

I was not concerned about the lack of redundancy in the data, but now I 
am.  It was probably nothing, but My academic questions about the best 
configuration suddenly seem more practical.

I gather that many of you have a problem with the Promise raid 
controllers.  I also see that alot seem to favour the 3ware 
controllers.  I feel I need to get a solution in place soon, probably 
over the Christmas holidays.

So, in a nutshell:

anything wrong with 4 - 80 GB 7200rpm EIDE drives with 8Mb cache running 
on a raid controller(as yet to be determined) in a configuration like 1 
+ 0 or 0 + 1?  This gets me effectively 80GB capacity and redundancy 
with the ability to withstand 2 drives dying, right?

this would get me, correct me if I am wrong, both redundancy and some 
performance increase, yes?

old drives, with no redundancy, are old smallscsi drives of 5400 rpm 
speed on old controller