I am going to be setting up a RAID 5 array in SUSE Linux and had a few questions to determine the best course of action.

I am going install SUSE on an 80GB hdd and mirror it to another 80GB. Then i am going to setup a 5x 500GB disk RAID 5 array for files to serve on my LAN. I was originally going to do a hardware RAID until i found out that if my RAID controller goes bad and I cannot find the same controller my RAID is probably gone forever so I started to look at software RAIDs in SUSE. I know it supports RAID 5 but i was wondering if i kill my OS am I able to remount the RAID 5 array in a fresh install of the OS without reformatting my drives and losing data since SUSE did create the array. I don't see why it couldn't but haven't found any hard evidence one way or the other. Also, if SUSE can rebuild it, I was wondering if down the road I decided I wanted to change distros to Slack would I be able to mount that array without reformatting.

Any help is appreciated or if this post should be in another section of the forums let me know...

Thanks in advance