RAID 5 On a Budget?
Jammin1911
Icrontian
Hi All!
Wondering if anyone has any experience building/assembling/purchasing hardware for a raid5 array on a budget.
I recently saw this on Newegg: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111139&cm_re=raid_tower-_-16-111-139-_-Product
Unfortunately it sold out.
It got me thinking how cheap a basic raid 5 setup can be had these days. I'm looking for a 5x2TB setup using 2TB WD Green Drives (yea yea I know about the issues with the error recovery timeouts).
This is merely for storage with redundancy and nothing else.
I'm wondering if anyone know of other products similar to this or maybe someone has a different idea for me.
I need something that will provide me with preferably 8TB of usable storage (I think I could live with 6TB for now.. maybe) (and yes I realize it wont be 8TB after formatting)
Does anyone have any suggestions or good solutions? A NAS would probably be OK too but I can't imagine that would be the most economical solution for cheap mass storage.
Also any suggestions on a different type of RAID to use would be great too - I don't know a lot about the different types - from what I understand RAID 5 is my ideal choice for what I'm looking to do which is just be protected from failed drives and store as much as possible. Performance is a non-issue.
Thanks!!!
Wondering if anyone has any experience building/assembling/purchasing hardware for a raid5 array on a budget.
I recently saw this on Newegg: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111139&cm_re=raid_tower-_-16-111-139-_-Product
Unfortunately it sold out.
It got me thinking how cheap a basic raid 5 setup can be had these days. I'm looking for a 5x2TB setup using 2TB WD Green Drives (yea yea I know about the issues with the error recovery timeouts).
This is merely for storage with redundancy and nothing else.
I'm wondering if anyone know of other products similar to this or maybe someone has a different idea for me.
I need something that will provide me with preferably 8TB of usable storage (I think I could live with 6TB for now.. maybe) (and yes I realize it wont be 8TB after formatting)
Does anyone have any suggestions or good solutions? A NAS would probably be OK too but I can't imagine that would be the most economical solution for cheap mass storage.
Also any suggestions on a different type of RAID to use would be great too - I don't know a lot about the different types - from what I understand RAID 5 is my ideal choice for what I'm looking to do which is just be protected from failed drives and store as much as possible. Performance is a non-issue.
Thanks!!!
0
Comments
Really hoping for a 5bay solution. Anyone else have good product suggestions? Rosewill seems to be a bit cheaper than the Sans Digital I posted.
I wouldn't buy the Sans Digital. Friend of mine had this unit: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111037&cm_re=Sans_Digital-_-16-111-037-_-Product and it failed. Getting it replaced/fixed under warranty took 2 months.
Not everyone will have that experience, but it steered me away from the brand.
I wouldn't be opposed to building my own case and buying my own card. I'm just not too sure about the electrical side of it - Is there anything complicated involved in splitting eSATA 5 ways?
There is a more expensive Silicon image multiplier with built in Raid you can purchase, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't do RAID5.
Be very careful, there's a lot of false information out there on these, they aren't well supported, drivers are flakey, and if things go wrong, you're going to at the very least, drop drives off the array, or lose the entire thing.
My latest train of thought is that it might be best to move my hardware to a new case and PSU that has 7 internal 3.5" bays and just buy a respectable second hand pcie raid controller. Does that sound logical?
Thanks a lot for the input!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811146051&Tpk=nzxt%20whisper
It wouldn't wake me up in the middle of the night, but it could prevent getting to sleep right away if there were a lot of data transfers going on. Guess it depends on how easily you fall asleep and how light of a sleeper you are. Should be fine next to the TV though.
The NZXT Whisper that shwaip linked is supposed to be a very nice case for noise reduction.
Thanks again for the input everyone.
Once I start actually putting this together I might bring this thread back from the dead for a little bit more input.
Really would prefer an online solution, but getting 4TB of space is hella expensive