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If so, I recommend highly against it. By having two non-redundant disks, you're DOUBLING your chances of a failure. I've had that actually HAPPEN to me in one of my servers, so I speak from experience.

Yes, RAID0 is striped - all I'm interested in is performance. These machines will be used to compile, but the code repository will be elsewhere. The workstations can (and will) get ghosted clean from time to time anyway.

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Even if RAID 0 is the one that's mirrored drives, I'd almost say forget it anyway, after seeing all the problems my friend Tod had with all of his RAIDed systems. He's lost data because of a controller failure, where plugging the drives into another controller, even of the same brand, did not recover the information.

The servers use Intel zero channel controllers in RAID5 mode, with a hot spare so a drive can fail and the array can rebuild itself all without any down time. Controller availability/compatibility is guaranteed by Intel for some period of years, although I'm thinking of buying a cold spare controller anyway.

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If you do decide to go ahead with RAID, make sure you've got the data backed up somewhere nightly.

Damn right - the fire safe is on order! I'm still trying to work out the most cost effective way of backing up 200GB every night. DAT is too small, and DLT robots cost a fortune. I'm considering using firewire connected hard drives for the nightly cycle but I'll still need tape for monthly "keepers" (or maybe a DVD-RW robot).

Rob