I'm finally getting around to dealing with a fileserver that I bought, and once I started dealing with it, I realized an issue that I hadn't considered, which is how to set up the RAID.

I have a system with eight 1TB drives. I suppose I might be able to hook up a pair of other drives, or even a flash drive of some nature for the OS, but let's assume I don't want to do that.

The only software RAID that Linux can boot is RAID1. (Let me know if that's not correct anymore.) I'd like the OS to be RAID protected, but I don't really want to lose a quarter of my available space for that. I suppose I could carve out 16MB or so from a couple of drives, but then I effectively lose that across all the drives, and I don't really need an 8-way mirror, even assuming Linux has support for that. Ideally, I'd carve 4MB out of each drive, and RAID10 them, but I don't think Linux will boot off of RAID10. Still, losing that 16MB per drive isn't a huge loss, and this is certainly the way I'm leaning right now.

The other obvious solution is to use hardware RAID, but my controller only supports RAID0 and RAID1, and I want to use a parity-based RAID for as much of the disk space as possible.

Am I missing any other options? Is there a boot loader that supports Linux RAID 5, for example?