Raid

Hardware raid on linux seems to have its moments. I spent 2 days fighting a raid card and eventually wrote it off. I have been running 90% of my servers on software raid1. This has proven very stable and reliable.

What I quiet enjoy is using reiserfs filesystem it seems to handle power outages as well with very little failure.

Some tips on Software raid

I always use raid 1.

I set the raid subset to boot in degraded mode (great when you can not access the console).

I set the swap and raid size exactly the same on both drives.

Weekly check the control using cat /proc/mdstat ;-)

When choosing software raid on Ubuntu use the alternative disk it is easier to configure at install level.

When you prompted for the guided partition

Setup manual partition
Follow this useful link.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SoftwareRAID

Chat latter while I complete this server install :)