We had software RAID in form of md devices on Linux for a long time. Here are few useful hints how to make it work better...
Scrub your array to check data consistency
I will assume that you are already monitoring your disks using smart, but from time to time it's useful to force full re-scan of your array to make sure that all data is still there and consistent. Some filesystems provide this option to scrub data on it's own (zfs and btrfs comes to mind) but if your filesystem is located on md array you can always force it using
echo check > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_actionI would suggest to do this from cron, hopefully during weekend or some other time when your load is lower.
Adding write-intent bitmap to speed up recovery
If you installed your md array a long time ago, you probably didn't turn on write-intent bitmap. It's very useful when you have to recover because bitmap will track changes and this will prevent long re-sync times when disks have to read and compare every block. To turn it on use:
mdadm --grow --bitmap=internal /dev/md0
Mirror between two devices of same speed
Recently, one of my 500Gb disks in RAID1 (mirror) failed. I decided to replace it with 1Gb drive which was unfortunately green drive (which basically means slow). Adding two drives of different speed in mirror will reduce performance to single slower drive which is a shame. Since I wasn't able to add additional disk and wasn't prepared to give up redundancy of data I started searching around and found that I can specify one disk as write-mostly using:
mdadm --add /dev/md0 --write-mostly /dev/sdb1Same trick will work on combination of hard drive and SSD, but in that case, you will slow down writes to speed of your hard drive.