For those who have lots of experience with this:
not lots, but i'll give it a shot.. :)
I need more hard drive space and a faster disc too. Assuming software based raid is reliable enough for a home user, and money is very tight, I have two options:
1. Buy a new fast disc
2. Use kernel software raid to mirror the current Western Digital Caviar 5400rpm 2mb cache 10gb drive with a 10gb partition on a new (but now very cheap) 5400rpm 40gb drive. The remaining 30gb on the new disc would be /home
Which setup would be faster?
by my understanding (and assumption that the "new fast disc" is not a 10k+ rpm drive) as long as the two drives are on separate ide channels, the raid-0 setup should be faster. if the two drives are on the same ide channel, there will be contention for the channel (as an ide channel can only talk to one device at a time, unlike scsi) which will drag down preformance. It still might be faster than the single fast disc, but not by much. take this with a grain of salt tho as i've only set up 2 raid arrays and they were on scsi systems purely for redundancy, not performance (raid-1 vs raid-0). -- trey