I’m probably not going to go to deep into this one.  Originally I thought this was going to be my choice.  I wanted a software solution, so that I wouldn’t be bound to specific hardware in the event of failure.  I also want a realistic option, which I think this failed to deliver.  My thoughts are from the point of view of a Windows user.  I can use Linux and usually do what I need, but that’s about it.  I don’t want this to be a machine to learn and play on, it should be considered “production” and mostly untouched once set up.  For this implementation I used Ubuntu 12 with mdadm and Disk Utility based on the guide at AINER.

Ease of Use

This is really where this solution is failing.  It’s not obvious, and I don’t want to pull out manuals and try to figure out what I’m doing just to replace a drive.  Maybe it’s easy for someone that lives in Linux daily.  Setting up the RAID array required help guides just to figure out which tools I want and what menu the options are under, which to me says it’s not the level of ease I want yet.  If you want to persue this option, I’d recommend the guide over at AINER.  The link is a couple of years old but it’s still valid in Ubuntu 12.  I didn’t have much trouble setting up a RAID array, but the first time I was unable to rebuild the array once I removed a drive.  It would simply give errors on trying to add another drive to the array, or once one was added nothing happened with it.  I even tried reverting to command line and tutorials, but I was unsuccessful.  I just could not justify the complexity of something that was very uncomfortable to me to save some money.

The second time I tried, the recovery worked exactly as intended.  When I added the new drive to the array, it was able to start rebuilding.  I then tried to expand the array by adding another drive into the array.  I was able to add a “Spare” to the array, but when trying to expand the array across a new drive it would simply error with something about mdadm exited with a code 1.  Super helpful.

I stopped evaluation at this point.  The evaluation never made it out of virtual machines, so I don’t have performance tests to post.  Initialization did take a long time, but in a virtual machine where all the virtual disks were on the same physical disk, I would not want to make any judgements off of that observation.  I’m very much pro-linux, but I also want to be realistic that this implementation, though promising, is not ready for my prime time machine.

Verdict

Ease of Use: 1/5, Recovery issues, needed guides
Drive loss limit: 1 (or 2 if using RAID 6)
Performance: N/A
Expansion / Upgrade options: Claimed, Unsuccessful
Efficiency: N-1 (or N-2 if using RAID 6)
Cost: Free
Viable: No