Multiple drives but no hardware raid

[kameleon]

I have just setup my proxmox server here at home again. This time I am using 1x 250GB IDE drive as my primary OS device and 8x 1TB drives as machine image storage etc. What I am trying to figure out is the best way to keep redundancy in the 8 drives while still keeping proxmox happy. I am running the new v2.0RC1. I have no real hardware raid, only fake raid I could enable on 5 of the drives leaving the other 3 our in the dark. I had thought of using FlexRAID but am not sure about that just yet. Then I thought about just running linux software raid but all I see on the forum is people trying to run the host OS on it. I just want the data drives protected, not the host OS. I will keep a backup of the host OS on another machine so that will be my backup for it. What would be my best bet in this setup? I would want to run at least a raid5 or maybe a raid50 so I could have 2 drive failures.

Originally I had planned on setting up the server with the lone 250GB drive and the others in a separate server to be served via iscsi but that turned out not to work that well when the other motherboard took a dump. So is there a safe way to do this all on one machine? I don't want to just extend the LVM across all 9 drives since that would not provide any protection. Any thoughts/insight is welcome.

 

[udo]

Hi,
normaly i suggest an real hw-raidcontroller. But if this not doable at home try linux softwareraid. I had made good experience with this (but not in conjunction with pve - there i use hw-raids).

Udo

 

[kameleon]

I am mostly wanting redundancy for my media. The machines will be backed up with backuppc anyways but I don't want to have to back up over 3tb of media like that.

So I may just see if I can source another motherboard for the "media storage" and use the flexraid there.