Despite certain frustrations with our Apple Xserve G5s, I’ve found that they make decent Linux servers, especially considering their age. Recently I wanted to repurpose one as a development server, and in that role I really wanted disk redundancy for added protection of the data. Unfortunately there’s no RAID controller in these servers, so software RAID is the only option. Originally RAID wasn’t crucial and I gave up on software RAID as it seemed too complicated to justify the time spent figuring out how to do it. This time, however, it was more important and I was determined to get software RAID functioning.