questions about RAID 0

[x88x]

If I'm buying a set for RAID, they're all the same drive, ordered at the same time.

Very rarely you might run into a problem with this.. A friend of mine who's a tech/admin at a web hosting company was building up a few large storage arrays for a client a few years ago and it just so happened that all of the Seagate Cheetahs that he was using were all from a run that had a bad supply of controller chips..~10 minutes after turning it on, the entire array went up in smoke (literally).

Thinking about how it would all work now, I'm pretty sure the array would just disregard the wasted space and that would be that.

It depends how you're doing the array. For example, on my fileserver I just use mdadm software RAID, addressing partitions, not physical drives. If you do that, you could easily have a separate partition for the rest of the drive. But, like you said, if that drive fails it wouldn't help you anyway...

[Konrad]

Oh, ick. Software RAID? What's the point?

[x88x]

Oh, ick. Software RAID? What's the point?

Cheap.
Flexible.
Durable (If all my controllers, my MBB, my CPU, and my OS HDD..well, OS CF in this case.. all fail, I just drop the drives in another Linux system and tell it to find the array).
Controller agnostic.
Easy multi-controller array.
Performance doesn't really matter in this implementation (simple storage, always accessed over 1Gbps ethernet, lower RPM low-power drives).
Oh, and did I mention cheap?

[Konrad]

Hmmm. Worth thinking about.