I can't call myself an expert on hardware-based IDE-RAID so I can't comment on the piece of hardware you mentioned. Folks seem to have had plenty of trouble in the past with hardware RAID. That might have gotten better recently. Check some of the Hardware Compatibilty Lists to see if you proposed hardware is supported and how well. Red Hat has one. Even
this site has an HCL (See it up there in the menu?
)
Software RAID has been around for a fairly long time and is pretty solid. You might want to take a look at the "md" driver in Linux for doing software RAID. Plus, it's supported by the Linux installation programs of many distributions; even for the root filesystem.
But hardware versus software aside, my first question would be:
How confident are you in your backup and restore process? The reason being that RAID 0 isn't, technically, RAID at all. The "R" in RAID stands for "Redundant" and with RAID 0 you have no redundancy. Lose a drive and the entire stripeset is toast and your data is unrecoverable. Especially if your backups aren't completely reliable. Personally, I'd choose RAID 1 or RAID 5 over RAID 0
any day. In fact, I can't recall using RAID 0 for anything besides a temporary raidset that I threw together for some developers to offload some installation CDs to (so they could speed up a set of application upgrades). I'd never use it to hold valuable information that I didn't have a copy (or two) somewhere else.
Good luck...
