Software vs. Hardware RAID

So my school's FIRST team was recently donated a bunch of old computers. One was an old Athlon (750 MHz?) with onboard RAID, which just happened to run FreeBSD. My friend and I are the resident gurus, so we've been setting up all the computers, and decided that it'd make an ideal network fileserver. (Last year we had at least five computers, and people saved files locally and then got them over network shares -- which was a total nightmare when you forgot what box you saved it on, and by the way, someone just reformatted that one sincei t was running slow...)

The problem is that, being the expert in Murphy's Law that I am, setting up a single fileserver with the one 40 GB drive it came with, I can almost guarantee that the drive will fail at some critical time.

I'm assuming that the onboard RAID only does 0 and 1. So I'm thinking of putting a spare 40 GB drive in and running mirroring.

But then I started thinking... We'd have 80 GB of disk space, but we could only use 40 GB and wouldn't get any speed increase. (Striping is out of the question, since it doubles the chance of losing data and the goal here is redundancy.) But if we threw one more disk in, we could run RAID 5 and get 80 GB space and most likely a nice speed increase, but also have redundancy. The problem is that we'd have to run software RAID, which could negate the speed advantage. (A nice $400 RAID card would be incredibly nice, but I'm sure we're not about to get the funds approved for it.)

What would you recommend? 2 Mirrored 40's in hardware RAID, or 3 40's in software RAID 5. There won't be an incredible number of people using it -- there'll be ten computers that could use it at the most, and I'm sure they won't all be doing concurrent writes / reads. (It'd run Linux or FreeBSD, but it's serving a Windows network, so we'd have samba going.)

 

 

 

 

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