I am looking using the on-board RAID controller of my SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SBE to setup a RAID-1 array with two Seagate ES2 hard disk drives. We have around 8 or so of these in production. I am going to use this for heavy Asterisk use with all calls recorded. We buffer to a RAM drive/tmpfs. I've read some posts regarding built-in raid being not worth the trouble, but since this is a good entry level server mainboard it might not apply to this? I am just concerned about redundancy and having production unaffected if one drive dies.
Here are the specifications of the server:
- Intel® Xeon® 3000 Sequence and Core™ 2 Quad / Duo Series in LGA775 Package (FSB 1333/1066/800 MHz)
- Intel® 3210 ICH9R + PXH + Intel® 82573V + Intel® 82573L Chipset
- Up to 8GB unbuffered ECC / non-ECC DDR2 800/667 SDRAM
- Intel® 82573V + Intel® 82573L PCI-E Gigabit Controllers
- Serial ATA
- Intel® ICH9R SATA2 (3 Gbps) controller built-in
- RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support (Windows Only)
- RAID 0, 1, 10 support (Linux)
Shall I go ahead with the onboard RAID-1 or go with Linux software RAID? If Hardware RAID - what's a good cheap SATA card?