I know we've had loads of discussions about RAID arrays on the board and I've learned a great deal about them as a result. We're usually talking about home storage solutions- which is best, cheapest, most reliable, software vs. hardware, whatever- but I recently had a thought about RAID in the empeg.
Is this even possible?
It's easy for me to think 'Ah- my home-made RAID-5 box runs Linux and so does the empeg!', but I realize there are limitations that I have no clue about.

As 160GB drives are now easily available and I don't have even 100GB of files to put on my empeg, would a 'mirrored empeg' protect me from the hardships of a dead drive?
Would a 'striped empeg' relieve the caching problems I've read (very little) about?
Has anyone ever thought about this before? I can't be the first.

Quick summary:

(1) The default/Hijack kernels do not include RAID support, but it can be configured with a custom kernel build.

(2) The empeg filesystem / startup would require some minor hacks to make it work.

(3) It won't help with anything, other than avoiding loss of tunes when one of the two drives dies.

(4) Uploading tunes to the empeg will be slower; system startup will be slower.

Cheers

I tried it in the past. It's harder than you might expect. I posted my empeg raid notes online.

Thanks Mark and Bitt!

It was just a thought that piqued my curiosity.

I've learned today that the drives aren't mirrored- only some of the partitions are.
<slaps forehead>

Regardless, there's not much difference. I got it to run successfully and mirror all relevant partitions (I didn't bother with the swap partition, basically).

That said, I agree that it's a little silly.

RAID 5 a pair of CF controllers which each support two cards. Watch the parity bits fly!!