I have two questions for someone.


1. For my file server, what is the best way to position my drives. I listed what I was planning doing, but if there is a better way for whatever reason, let me know please.

IDE0 Primay Master = 20GB for OS
IDE0 Primary Slave = CDROM

{raid 5 for storage}
IDE1 Primay Master = 160GB
IDE2 Primary Master = 160GB
IDE3 Primary Master = 160GB

Is this my best bet for the server, or should I put the 3 160GB drives all on the PCE IDE controller and set one of them to a slave?

2. If one of the drives in a RAID5 should fail, do you even get read access to the files, or are you stuck until a new drive is put in to re-generate the RAID?

Thanks for any and all help.

In my opinion, it is best to keep the drives on separate IDE channels if you can. Therefore, I like your setup.

If a drive fails, you can still use your data. No problem, that is how it is meant to be. You should experiment before you get a lot of data on the drives. Set the raid up, then mark one as failed and remove it. Compare the results of cat /proc/mdstat before and after. Then add the drive again. It will be automatically resynced and added to the raids. (you can again cat /proc/mdstat to see the progress of this syncing.

In your setup there looks room to add another drive which could be setup as a spare drive...which means if one of the drives fails in the main raid, it would be added in on the fly.