A RAID-ing I will go...

[Dan Langille]

I have two 3Ware 7006-2 cards (capable of RAID-1 on two IDE drives) and
one Adaptec 2400A (RAID-5 on 4 IDE drives).

At present, the 3Ware cards are in FreeBSD machines (ngaio and polo).
The goal: move one 3Ware card to my Windows XP workstation and install the
2400A in its place.

polo is my main development workstation.  It has 80GB now and is at 37%
capacity.  After installing the 2400A with 4x80GB drives under RAID-5,
I'll have 240GB of space (which may be more space than is currently used
on my entire network).

I plan to do this in two moves: ngaio is rarely used, I can live without
it for some time.  I will use the 3Ware controller from that.  Then use a
trial version of some disk cloning software to populate the array.  I
could use dd under FreeSBIE, which would be an interesting exercise.

Once the NT controller is up and running, I'll install the 2400A in polo,
dd everything over, adjust /etc/fstab, and see how things go.  It can't be
that simple...

Any comments?

One point about hardware RAID: it's nice to have a spare card around
in case your controller fails.... I think I'll hunt down another 2400A....

-- 
Dan Langille - http://www.langille.org/