[plug] RAID newbie

[Sol Hanna]

Hi there,

I'm about to purchase a new office server and have got a quote for a simple 
RAID set up using a RAID (PCI?) card with two 80G Western Digital HDDs and a 
single 40G Western Digital HDD for the operating system (Linux of course). 
The quote is reasonable but I've never setup RAID before. I've just been 
reading a RAID howto at linuxhq.com and may read others, but it hasn't 
totally put me at ease.

The article talks about Promise RAID. So there are a few types mentioned in 
the intro, but I don't even know what I've got a quote for (although I assume 
it's Promise as I've got a fairly straight forward ATA IDE setup). I was 
under the impression that modern RPM distros (latest SuSE or Mandrake) auto 
detect and have sensible defaults when it comes to installing with raid. Is 
this so?

Are there any gotchas or things to watch out for when it comes to buying and 
setting up RAID?

Craig told me at the last meeting that software RAID was better in his 
opinion. Is this just a matter of installing multiple HDDs and configuring 
them to act as RAID drives? 

Any other words of wisdom for this RAID newbie?

cheers & thanks in advance,
sol