What kind of loss?

[weezypenguin]

If you have 4 x 36gig scsi drives ina raid 5 array.
How much would you lose? I realise when you format a hard drive it never gives you the full amount.

Also if the serverhad a raid array as the primary, is it possible to add some IDE drives to the system aswell?

CHeers for all you help guys

[glc]

RAID 5 gives you the capacity of all but one drive - so your array would be reported at about 103 gigs after formatting. Every drive you add to the array will add another 34 to 35 gigs, and you can also add drives for "hotspares" - which will kick in and rebuild if a drive in the array fails. Yes, you can add IDE drives for additional storage, just make sure the bios is set to boot from SCSI first.

RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives (this would give you about a 69 gig array and you could use the 4th drive as a hotspare) - but a 4 drive array will perform better. Adding more drives above 4 will not increase the performance any more, just the capacity.

[weezypenguin]

Cheers, you really know your stuff.
You rock