Need assistance w/ RAID enclosure pls

[markem]

Jay - do you want maximum storage or maximum redundancy? The more redundancy the less actual storage you have. For example:

Raid 0 is no redundancy, so you get all 4TB for storage but the pooch is screwed if something happens to the disks.

Raid 1 is disk mirroring, so you would halve your storage for the price of having an exact duplicate of the drives.

Raid 2 uses but striping, which is pretty good for maximizing your use of the drives, but can be very slow to recover and less robust that '3'

Raid 3 uses striping at the byte level plus additional check data. If you can afford the use of space, I would recommend going with this one.

Raid 4 really isn't used.

Raid 5 is the most robust and easiest to recover from in the event of a disk failure.

All these techniques work fine with 4 disks, but you really only get 1 disk worth of storage space except with Raid 1 where you get half the storage of the total array.

If this seems too techie, you may find more useful information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

The type of raid you want affects the systems that are applicable.

I have a friend who runs a small ISP who I can ask raid questions to, so I'll ping him for his recommendations.