I'm no expert on HP controllers, best guess would be to get the exactly same type of drives you already have

as for the Dell 36Gb disks... that's not much space at all, and those drives are OLD....

ok, what you do is
1. insert the new drives (should be hot-add iirc)
2. go into the raid controller utility and create a new raid array over those new drives. you can insert 3 drives, use 2 as...

I presume you have a raid-1 in there with the original two drives?

1. yes, you need many drives, so I would go for several smaller drives instead of 3 large ones. also the raid policy set in the controller is important for performance
2. mobo controllers support...

should work, if the card fits in

the onboard controllers are what we call fakeraid. they are basically almost the same as software based raid, only working through a driver. that makes the raid config not transparent to the OS.

a...

the usual practice is to set up raid1 for the OS, and a striped raid (5/5E/6/10/50/etc) for the data

what exactly are you going to use for the OS? 2x 80Gb drives in Raid1, or did I not get you correctly?


for large files, raid1 is a bit too slow. you will be better off with a few drives in raid5...

with three drives the only options are raid1+HS, raid0 or raid5

raid0 will be fastest, raid1+HS will be the most redundant

DST is Drive Self Test, meaning it will test the mechanoical and logical part of the drive. This test sends a set of commands to the HDD firmware. it does not touch the FS at all.
in order to keep...

get a DST done on the disks. if it fails, replace the drive and reinstall

it's impossible to test the drives in an array separately, on the FS level.
if you have a raid0, be ready to lose all data on both drives, should you lose one of them.

google it man.

if your system supports booting from it
but USB is much slower than ATA or SCSI, so the performance hit will be huge

yup

if a proper DST fails, you need to replace the HDD. it means it hasn't passed it's own internal diags

is the disk IDE, SATA or SAS?

should buy an eSATA enclosure to connect that external HDD to an eSATA port

yes. the solution is BACKUP

only way to recover anything from that is to take it to a disk recovery lab. they might be able to recover the files. however the disk itself is absolutely dead, and needs to be replaced

if the enclosure is capable of both RAID and JBOD (and they usually are), you can use it to view multiple HDDs

SCSI is more reliable than SATA. and SCSI is being replaced by SAS now, not by SATA.

who said disks fail only because of temperature conditions? that's only one reason, and definitely not the main one

you are confusing hotswap with hotspare. a hotspare is a drive that is idle, and if a disk fails in a raid array, this drive jumps in to take it's place.

the normal server configuration - Raid1 for OS, Raid5 for Data and 1 global hotspare

SATA is just as expandable as SAS, and SAS is much more expandable than SCSI

mirror on 8 disks?

LOL
if I had a proper server for my own use, I'd set it up with ESX or XEN and run a whole network in it :)

no, the HBA is there for external connections to a SAN. And you generally should have two for channel redundancy

I've recently set up an array of 26 SAS drives for a bank in the UK - the access times to the SAS array is faster then the access time to their server internal SCSI drives.

that doesn't mean the...

just read the wiki articles, everything is explained.

the more devices you use on a SCSI the slower they are, because the bus is shared.
for better performance use SAS. It is partially...

should and will work.

I was referring to this:

the drivers are not for the hard drive, but for the sata controller on the motherboatd

well, if I had a proper PC I'd put the drive inside it, it's a normal sats disk in there, but since I have a laptop - no luck.
and Irish prices for computer parts are so high, I'll probably stick to...

well, my XP is at SP1 level, I can't update it because of the software I am using on it.

my advice - move to Linux :)

having the same issue - it disappears in XP, bluescrrens in Vista, but works perfectly in Ubuntu.

I managed to get the drive to run longer before it locks out by updating the system BIOS.

well, and old PC with lots of disk space and a printer attached is the easiest to implement. it is also probably the cheapest and the customizable solution

imo the best thing to do is to set up an old PC as a home server.
another option would be to get a SOHO NAS box, and a wired (or even wireless) enabled printer

depends what the problem is with the HD