OpenPayments Developer Contest

RAID for a SCM server

I need to buy/build a server to host our Subversion repository (FYI: I am a dev/not an IT guy). Obviously this is mission critical, and needs to have high network and disk i/o performance. Our repository is currently 5GB and we support 20 devs. The server was going to be Windows 2008, but Linux is an option if it is a compelling and simpler/easier solution.

My first priority, of course, is data integrity. If a drive fails, I want to have the machine stop writes and be able to put a new drive in quickly to have the machine back up and running as fast as possible. (I can deal with a few hours of downtime, but not a few hours of "work" during the downtime).

I don't think I need (or want) RAID 5, as the rebuild cost seems to high/complicated.

At a minimum, I could use RAID 1, and have a backup disk (clearly one not from the same batch or even maker ;-)

RAID 1+0 looks like it might be faster? Is it worth the complexity?

Can someone point me to some suggestions and best practices for managing a RAID drive, in particular, whatever solution is offered, how do I manage the disk failure. Is there software that can notify me (email/pager) if a drive dies? Software that will prevent writes to the disk at that point?

Any other things I need to think of?

Thanks



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