I am doing a last minute relocation of a file server. I am creating a new one and need some info. First I am not too sure on linux and RAID. I want to create a RAID 5 with 3 SATA disks. I also want to have a seperate drive for the OS that will not be in the raid. The RAID would be only for data storage. Is this possible? I am also going to need a PCI SATA RAID card, anyone have any recommendations? Also can I install my OS before I create the RAID? Or should I wait till everything is here and set the RAID up first?

3ware makes reasonably priced hardware raid 5 sata pci cards. You need to look for the ones around $300.00, or even less, because 3ware also makes expensive raid cards. Put the whole installation on raid. All you do is boot the install CD, and a 3ware card looks just like a hard drive to linux, but it's actually got a raid array attached. One thing you could do is give the array the mount point '/home', and let everything else install on a single drive outside the raid system, but this is idiotic. The whole purpose of raid is so the machine never needs to go down if a drive fails. I know there is also raid striping, another idiotic invention with virtually nothing to gain, and everything to lose. You are trying to make it so you can easily do upgrades, without the raid headache, but forget about it. With the 3ware card, the raid array is a device, like any other device, and it looks just like a single drive to linux.

Thanks for that reply. My main goal was to put the OS on a separate drive out side the raid. The reason for this is only data is on the drives that are being raided. I could always swap the OS drive out. Let me ask another question. Is there a benefit to using a pci-e 4 or 8x card over PCI? I don't think I would see a difference in performance.