Server rebuild recommendations

[wsuetholz]

Hello,
  My server's OS drive is in the process of self-destructing, so I'm going to have to do a rebuild.

  I have a combination of 4 1TB drives, and 3 500GB drives.. Of which 2 1TB and 2 500GB are filled with media/other systems backups.  The OS drives are presently running on the IDE 0 channel, and I have 4 SATA II and 4 SATA (PCI Card) channels.  Only the system board channels are bootable.
  What would be the recommended setup? I was thinking RAID 1 for the OS (500GB Drives) and RAID 5 for the Data (1TB Drives).  I do have a backup scheme in place for the database.  I'm mostly concerned with uptime on this rebuild.  But, I have issues with the 1/2 the storage space that Raid 1 results in.  I realize that Raid 5 has some write time performance issues as well.

Thanks

[jonsnipes]

ive got 4 drives setup in software raid on a fedora server and read/write times are not noticeably slower.   ive never had any issues streaming dvds over the network or writing over the network (100mbs)  i ussually try and find small harddrives to store the os on..  since they need so little room to acctually hold the os i use the big drives for media storage.  a 20gb drive is more than enough to hold and run the os..  that way i dont have any fear of loosing media if the os bugs up for some reason..  plus you can always backup your config files to your raid for reinstalls..  esspecially with the way linuxmce installs and wipes a whole disk clean.  id spring for a couple of small ide drives to run the os off of then set up the rest of the drives in whatever kind of array youd like to store media only