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I'm curious if it's the lockups or your desire for 'safety' that has steered you away from software RAID5.


I have software RAID working on my firewall (also webserver etc...) and before putting anything really important on it I went through a series of tests to ensure that if a drive fails I know what to do and know it works. I did suffer a HD failure on that system and I didn't loose any of my data, although it wasn't as smooth as I would have liked.

So far I haven't been able to do the same with RAID 5 and FreeNAS. In fact at the moment I can't even get the thing to mount! So I think it's a matter of trust. I figure a hardware solution will be more able to recover from a drive failure. So I guess it's data security not the lockups.

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If it's the lockups, the specs you quote are WAY above what I built for my NAS box, so something's wrong with your software selection or maybe execution.


Yea, the specs are a little high, but it's what I have to work with. I am moving towards a solution that takes the pressure off my main clarkconnect server, as I would like to run that mail server on that soon. I think I have already decided to bin FreeNAS and stick with clarkconnect, I know that works and is stable.

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If it's 'data safety', I'm wondering what specific points have you found to convince you hardware RAID is the way to go.


I read this article. Saw the interface for the BIOS and thought "That's what I need!". If I can find a cheap enough card I think my data will be safer with a hardware solution. Am I wrong?

Cheers

Cris.