[vox-tech] Mirrored drive setup for backup

[Dylan Beaudette]

Hi everyone,

I am looking into some methods of keeping some of our labs shared data in a 
slightly safer disk setup. Currently there are two single 300Gb SATA drives 
in this machine. I am thinking about installing another set of mirrored 300Gb 
drives and using this mirrored setup to hold all of the shared data. This 
would give me two single drives for operations which require instant access 
(i have heard that a mirrored setup is not as fast as a single drive), and 
the mirrored array for redundancy. This machine is running Debian/Unstable, 
and has a Tyan Thunder K8WE motherboard. It looks like this board supports up 
to 4 SATA drives, along with RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and 'JBOD' .

Another machine in this lab only supports RAID level 0 for the SATA 
connectors. Is there a workable software RAID strategy for mirroring disks in 
linux or will I need to purchase a new hard disk controller?

Would this type of setup be either possible or worthwhile for a simple 
safeguard against hardware failure? If not, are there other options which 
would be better suited for this task?

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

dylan

-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Group
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341