Despite the recent buzz to move everything to the “all mighty”cloud, sometimes you may not want your information in someone else’s server or it just maybe unfeasible to download the volumes of data that you require from the internet every time (for example image deployment). So before you clear out a place in your budget for a storage solution, consider a configuration that is licensing free with Linux.

With that said, going cheap/free does not mean “throwing caution to the wind”, and to that end, we will note points to be aware of, configurations that should be set in place in addition to using software RAID, to achieve the maximum price to reliability ratio.