RAID...? HW? SW?

[imported_Yonzie]

Currently, I have a file server running Linux with 8 120GB disks bunched together with LVM (Logical Volume Manager).
This works pretty good, except for the lack of data security if a drive should fail.

I now want to upgrade this box (another, actually, but forget that) to a MythTV backend, however, I am not sure how I should set up the drives.
I'll have 2 Hauppauge PVR-250 cards, 1-2 S-ATA controllers (possibly RAID) and a Gbit NIC.
Motherboard is a Tyan Tiger MP with 2 1.4Ghz Athlon XPs (Can I put a TV-card (32bit PCI) in a 64bit PCI slot and still have the 64bit PCI bus work at 64bits for the other cards?)

I need 30-40MB/sec of write speed and the same in read speed from the disks. Simultaneously.
I would like to use Software RAID 5, since I can then go with cheap HighPoint controller cards.
I'd also like to get a LSI MegaRAID SATA 300-8X, but it's expensive and unavailable at the moment. I read somewhere that the release date should be in march, but it's apparently been pushed back quite a bit already so...
Maybe, RAID5 isn't for me...

Please tell me what to do, I really don't know at the moment...

 

[Matthias99]

I need 30-40MB/sec of write speed and the same in read speed from the disks. Simultaneously.
I would like to use Software RAID 5, since I can then go with cheap HighPoint controller cards.
I'd also like to get a LSI MegaRAID SATA 300-8X, but it's expensive and unavailable at the moment. I read somewhere that the release date should be in march, but it's apparently been pushed back quite a bit already so...
Maybe, RAID5 isn't for me...

RAID5's write performance is pretty lousy, and I am fairly confident you will not get those kinds of STR numbers if you are trying to read AND write simultaneously. You might consider RAID0+1 if you want redundancy and good performance for both reads and writes.

 

[desy]

SW raid 5 sucks
SWraid is typically only recommended for Raid 1 mirroring