jdmeister @ Wed Feb 24, 2010 7:11 pm wrote:
Raid 3 is the minimum I would use, (If I used Raid) and 3 will recover data from one failed drive in a three (4) drive system
(Drive zero (0) to boot and three for the raid.
RAID-5 is the most commonly used design for what you describe. RAID 3 & 4 are seldom used as they have very poor performance due to the dedicated parity drive. Three hard drives in a Raid-5 design stripe the parity data across all the drives allowing you to recover a failed drive from the other two as well as very fast access times. In my 15 years of IT I have never seen a Raid-3 or 4 array.
FYI: The RAID number (1,2,3,5,10, etc) has nothing to do with the number of drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Organization
RAID is used for 24/7 fault tolerance in situations where you cannot have ANY downtime due to a drive failure. If you are running a 24/7 Karaoke operation, I would highly recommend it.
Otherwise, just make a backup!