More & More RAID

One of the things that sold me on using DL360 servers was the fact they already had hardware RAID and hot swappable SCSI drives. The HP hardware RAID is very easy to set-up via a bios utility. I made a simple RAID 1 array for the phone systems and I will probably do the same when I roll out an email server for him later on this year. This set-up makes it dead simple for anyone to rebuild the array by simply replacing the hard drive which only takes a minutes if you have spare drives already in caddies.

All my research on RAID was interesting but in reality a RAID 1 array is all I will probably need for a home server. RAID 5 and 1+0 would be an interesting mental exercise but is overkill for home purposes. This is additionally true since 1TB drives can be purchased for under $80 and 2TB drives for $200 USD now. The side benefit of only using two drives is a smaller case can used and electrical consumption will be reduced.

I still plan on using software RAID in my home server due to the cost factor.