Hi, Just triple checking what I think I've learned here before I start loading Gentoo. Parts are arriving and I'm staring to put them together to build a combo low-use server (backups and MythTV) as well as desktop for my wife. I can do anything up to 6 drives but want the RAID to survive in the face of possibly two drive failure. This is all low bandwidth stuff. I'm fairly focused at this point on doing RAID1 using 3 drives. Unless I hear differently I believe a 3-drive RAID1 could survive 2 drive failures, and as well any single drive could be taken to another machine or even placed in an external USB/eSATA drive container in the event of some major motherboard failure. Is any of that incorrect? Also, along the way folks have mentioned hot spares but I'm not seeing that a hot spare does much for RAID1. Am I incorrect about that? Granted, I guess the rebuild starts automatically and maybe that's worth it, but I'm thinking that mdadm can probably let me know fairly quickly that I need to do some work. I've purchased 6 drives so I'll have 2 or 3 spares around and I can do a hot spare but I don't see the value in spinning the drive for a year burning power and wearing the drive out vs. just putting it on the shelf and keeping it in reserve for a rainy day. Off to start tearing into packaging. Thanks in advance again for all the great info I've gotten so far. Cheers, Mark -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
