Back in early November I built a new computer. It’s a moderately high-end computer — 2 gigabytes of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor — but its most distinguishing feature is its storage subsystem: three 750GB hard drives. My plan was to make a RAID-5 array out of these drives, for about 1.5 terabytes of usable storage space and protection against drive failure. I figure this should be enough storage space for me for the next 4 or 5 years.

My plan was also to encrypt the RAID array using Linux‘s “dm-crypt” feature, as I’ve already been doing on my laptop for over a year. I think a 1.5TB encrypted RAID-5 array — which I can then subdivide into logical volumes with LVM — is pretty cool.

Unfortunately, after I’d put everything together and installed the operating system (which itself required jumping through some hoops), I found that I had a problem: frequent, severe filesystem corruption anytime lots of disk activity was occurring. And Debian‘s “aptitude” package-management tool would frequently print garbled text when I launched it. And one of the hard drives had logged an I/O communication failure in its SMART log.

Uh-oh.