One of the drives in my RAID5 array seems to have comitted hara kiri. Just as I was making my morning tea, its death screams beeped forth from the hall — not very honorable — and on reboot, the RAID BIOS screen throws up a horrid red “Broken array” message.

Since the whole server is a bit shagged anyway, I think I’m going to decomission it and move to mirrored 1.5Tb drives. This will give a bit of extra capacity as well as using less power than my current 4-drives-plus-raid-card configuration. I can bump Ubuntu up from 7.10 to the 9.04 beta as well.

So — with drives ordered and an external USB caddy on the way for backing everything up — I shall find out about setting up drive mirroring in software under Ubuntu. Wish me luck!