4 x 500GB RAID Question

numbersixnumbersix
edited June 2006 in Hardware
Hello All,

I've been given the task at work to build a storage system solely for archiving data (of approx. 350GB) but this needs to have room for expansion in the future to add storage.

My current choice is a Dell PowerEdge SC1420 SATA as it has a max staorage of 2TB SATA.

What I want to know is if it's possible for me to have 4 X 500GB set up in some way so that 2 X 500GB are used for the storing of data and the other 2 X 500GB will be used to mirror these?

And if this is possible what RAID controller should I use?

Would this be an option form the dell website:
C7 Hardware RAID 0, Two Hard drives connected to add in CERC SATA RAID controller.

Sorry for so many questions, and it's only my first post.

Thanks.

Comments

  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited June 2006
    if your archiving data, your not going to want to use a raid array with no parity ( a way of getting data back if a drive fails ). i wouldnt even trust mirroring with that. and if you go raid 5, you only need 3 500 gig drives.

    if the goal is to keep 350 gigs of data and have room for expansion i recomend a 3 disk raid 5 array. that would be 2 500 gig drives used for storage, and 1 500 gig drive to hold all of the parity information ( data and parity are actually spread out evenly across the volume ).

    i would look for a raid card that has online expansion, which means you can add another drive to the array without having to rebuild it again. only higher end cards are capable of online expansion. but they are usually alot higher quality than those which dont support that feature.

    im quite partial to the Areca line of raid controllers though there are others that i would say are just as good. Im not too much of a fan of silicon image, or promise
  • numbersixnumbersix
    edited June 2006
    Thanks for that, this is a new challenge for me so I'm looking to keep it as simple as possible to start off with. And apologies if my questions seem a bit, well, stupid. I need to read up on RAID types.

    So could I have 4 x 500 Gig drives in raid 5? Basically I want maximum storage from the maximum capacity of the system which will be 2TB. Say I want to have 1.5TB Total for storing data, would this work?

    Thanks,

    Oh, and more importantly, your signature, it's scary; what's it from?
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited June 2006
    the way the math works for raid 5 is:

    take the total number of hard drives. lets say 4. The parity information which allows the raid array to be accessable if a drive dies takes you the total capacity of 1 of the drives in the array.

    so if you have 4 drives, in raid5, that would be 4-1 for parity.

    which means 4x300 gig drives - 1x300 gig drives = 3x300 gigs = 900gigs of total storage.

    4x500 gig drives -1x500 gig drive = 1.5TB of total storage.

    you can have as many drives in an array as the raid controller can support. as i see you know WindowsXP is limited to 2TB. if the machine ran Server2k3 or Advanced Server 2000 SP4 it can support 512TB. Linux also has no limitation of volume size, but i am NO linux guru.

    as far as i know, you should be able to use 5X500 gig drives and the volume should be 2TB, because it will use 1 of the 500 gig drives for parity. I dont want you to think that the parity is store all on one drive mind you. its blanketed arross all of the drives, just like the data is.

    the sig is from a music video by the Aphex Twins called Come To Daddy. :)
  • WuGgaRoOWuGgaRoO Not in the shower Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    did boy girl song come before or after come to daddy?
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