Should I rip and replace my disks to a RAID-5 system and boot disk

[Taverner]

...with 5 500GB drives making that drive up?

It would give me 2TB of space, and I could lose a disk!

[whistler162]

1. Might go with one 500gb drive and 4 1tb drives

unless you already have the drives.

But you would gain a little piece of mind.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490

[HopeHoops]

2. Depends on the drive management system.

In general, mirroring the system disk is your best option, using RAID-5 for the data partitions. In your case, that would take you down to 1.5TB, but it is a safer way to go. You can break the mirror and use the secondary drive to bring up the system in the case of a radical drive failure and that's pretty reliable on damn near any system now. Getting a RAID-5 out of recovery mode depends heavily on the disk management system and it is almost certainly going to be easier of you're working from a live system. I've had to reconstruct the damn things manually by entering everything down to the plex information and that's never a good time.

RAID-5 is the best performance/safety/capacity option I know of, but I've had enough troubles bringing volumes back online after a drive failure that I would seriously advise you to avoid that for your system disk. You're always in better shape working with a fully-booted system and using the GUI tools in your first attempt to initiate a recovery. That may not always work, but it is easier and less error-prone. Loss of data on RAID-5 is pretty damn rare, but that doesn't imply that a disk failure won't cause you a massive headache. Besides, unless the physical disks are all on separate controllers, you're still in danger of losing the entire volume, data and all, in the event of a controller failure.

Drives are fairly inexpensive now. My main box here at the house has 2 1.5TBs mirrored and six 1TB externals (full-time on-line). I've got a bunch of other externals as well but I bounce them around between machines, mostly for backups. Another thing to consider is that drives are far more reliable now than they were in years past. I can only think of one drive that has completely failed in the last five years and it was an older one. I've got BOXES of dead drives in the basement - including one that's the size of box of tissues (like 80 MB or something). I'm not sure if it matters anymore, but the only drives I'll buy now are Seagate. I don't think I've ever had one of those fail. It could just be personal prejudice - I can't honestly say I've seen a brand reliability comparison in the last ten years.

Regardless of how you configure the drives, just be damn sure you've got an automated backup setup - and one that allows you to go back in time if necessary. Of course that means more drives...

[JanMichael]

3. Yes, no, I don't know what you're talking about...nt.