[K12OSN] [OT] Firewire or USB2 in a softRAID setup

[Shawn Powers]

I'm just looking for advice and/or links regarding the subject line.

I'm looking to make a cheap, *safer* mass storage area.  If I have say 4 
firewire drives and 2 USB2 drives, is it possible (read: feasible) to 
create a software RAID5 array with them in linux?

I'm comfortable with software raid on internal drives, but I'm not sure 
how it would be done with firewire/USB2 drives.  My big worry is that it 
seems it depends on the order the kernel sees USB/FW drives as to what 
device they are named.  Since RAID depends on specific drives being 
specific stripes, I would worry that a reboot would render the array 
useless.  (If /dev/sda was /dev/sde on reboot, how would such a thing be 
handled?)

I know that performance would be bad on such a beast -- but I'm looking 
for mass storage, that would not need to be fast at all.  And I don't 
want to use Windows Server. :)

Any thoughts?
-Shawn

-- 
Shawn Powers
Technology Director
Inland Lakes Schools
PHN: 231-238-6868 x9174
FAX: 509-356-7024
spowers at inlandlakes.org
http://techcorner.inlandlakes.org

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