I'm paranoid, so I have two rules: 1. If you are using a hardware raid solution, then RAID1, and only if one of the drives can be pulled out and used by a stan

I'm paranoid, so I have two rules: 1. If you are using a hardware raid solution, then RAID1, and only if one of the drives can be pulled out and used by a standard SATA controller to get the data off. Controllers that munge the MBR just go in the trash. 2. Otherwise software raid1 or raid10. Raid5 and Raid6 IMHO are more trouble than they are worth. Now, true, I'm not spending $6k on drives, so maybe at that quantity, Raid6 makes more sense. But there I would argue that the money you save on drives, you throw away as soon as it goes tits up. I've tried Raid5 with promise and areca cards and the performance was not as good as software raid10. Plus, on several occasions the transfer to the hot-spare failed and brought the array down. The data was there, but it required operator assistance (me). Until it went down, it was staggeringly slow. If you really want to make sure that the array is available, use Raid1 with three or more drives. They are just so cheap. I was responsible for a windows server at a start-up a long while ago, and Raid5 sucked ass. Bonus: one day two drives failed. Tape restore is slow. Oh yeah: Don't just buy four drives and slap them in. Quite often a whole batch of drives will be bad. Buy drives from different manufacturers and beware that the sizes will be every so slightly different, so make your partitions smaller than the smallest. However, all of this is irrelevant if you really want a lot of storage. For that it seems that a distributed, redundant file system would be best. If you want, you should be able to pull a drive or two out of every server, or all the drives out of a few servers, and still have all your data.