Storage capacity consideration

In my notebook, I have a 60GB disk, 27+14=41GB considered for the whole Linux system and 11.5GB left for various personal files. In my backup PC, I have a 112GB /home partition (LVM on RAID-5) and 12GB left, another 12GB are available on the /usr partition and 8.6GB in /opt, and as everything is on LVM, it might be resizable. So there’s currently no real need for additional disk space. The only drawback is that I can’t hold all music files on my notebook and that the available space is splitted into two partitions. But I can live with that, I just have to consider that some things will be in a mounted subdirectory.

When space will get small, I’ll buy a 160GB notebook-disk. And my backup PC will be a new one with two 500GB SATA-disks on RAID-1. I won’t take a kind of commercial network storage array, as these aren’t capable of rsync or the like.

I thought about taking RAID-5 again instead of RAID-1. Three 320GB disks are cheaper than two with 500GB, but data redundancy decreases from 2 to 1.5. Only one disk may fail in both cases, no matter if you’ve got two disks at RAID-1 or three disks at RAID-5. In addition, the probability that two disks fail is three(!) times higher when there are three disks as if there were only two. For me, RAID-5 is therefore just a strategy for expansion, not for starting freshly.