I am intrested in setting up a RAID drive so that I can add more space to my storage drive (backup and MythTV) as it starts getting full. I am a debian newbie. I suppose I need to start with what I have in terms of slots in my box. How do I interrogate my system to find out what it has and is capable of?

Are there any good, readable tutorials for setting up raids that anyone can point me to? I have searched but when your search for RAID you end up with lots and lots of dead ends.

A friend at work said they thought that not only would I need an additional drive but also a controller that is specifically built for RAID. What about drives/controllers? What is recommended there?

You don't need a raid controller. You can set it up with software raid.

I don't have any links for howto to do it, but i'm sure there are lots of howto's out on the web.

software raid is not advisable... it is pretty slow and is not a real raid!
hardware raid however is faster as it has it's own hardware to process the raid! hence hardware raid :-)
if you want to use sata, a lot of motherboards already support raid - though that is not always a good solution - for sata you can buy 3ware cards which provide 'proper' hardware raid.
for scsi hard disks you buy an scsi controller. the advantage of scsi would be the various raid types you can configure and use, the downside is the cost.

the up side of sata is how cheep it gets (in comparison with scsi) but you are limited to raid 0 (which is not a real raid) and raid 1 (mirroring)

raid 1 is fast and ok for personal use.

for scsi, raid 0+1 (or 1+0) is pretty fast and relyable, or raid 5 is used commonly too.

raid requires at least 2 physical disks

You might be right that there are lots of howto's out on the web, but they sure are hid very good. I have been using google for over a month trying to find a howto. I want to use SUSE 10 to set up a RAID 5 software RAID. So if any body knows how to do this I would appreciate your help. Or if you know where I can find a howto please let me know where to find it.

I'm new at using linux so I need step by step help. Again I appreciate any help.

Carl

i googled for 'howto software raid 5' and got a few results, may not be speciffic to openSuSE 10 but it's mostly going to be the same anyway - perhaps appart from the fact that you would not be using yast. - other wise check yast - i have many times seen software raid stuff in there!