Anybody here doing software RAID 1? I'm thinking about picking up a dual xeon w/2 120GB HDD's and using software RAID to mirror them.

Would this be a very big performance hit on dual xeon's? Or is this a stupid idea?

I did try it on my P4 2.8 and Celeron 2.4 and there seems to be some performance hit as the sites does a lot of writing.

I would think that a daily backup would do better because with RAID, if something is deleted from the primary drive, it would be deleted from the slave drive too. Same goes with someone messing with the system files. With a backup, you could prevent that from happening and keep several days archives when needed.

This will be on top of Disksync storage. The information on the new server will be very important, I need redundancy. But I'm not willing to shell out the $$ for the SCSI RAID's and don't want the cheap hardware used by SM in their IDE RAID server.

If you need the redundancy then Yes.

For me with the software RAID, I am not sure if it is because of RAID but things did get a couple of seconds slower each time.

Currently what I am doing is backup to secondary harddisk, backup to DiskSync and backup to Remote server.

Thanks for the replies.

I'm assuming that it wouldn't be terribly slower on a dual 2.8GHz Xeon box. So a small performance hit is ok. I just want to make sure that I'm not crippling the server and causing customers sites to be s-l-o-w.

As for software, are you using Windows built-in RAID via converting to Dynamic disks, or another method?

Yes, that's the method I've used.

Actually 3Ware 7000/8000 dual channel EIDE RAID 1 controllers used by SM are very powerful. All my servers are RAID level 1 or 5. Raid does not replace backup but eliminates most common cause of downtime, disk failure.