6 Port Raid 5 Card

SoundEng · 28 Feb 2011 at 21:05

Hi guys,

can anyone recommend me a good 6 port RAID 5 card? can be either pci or pcie have both slots, its to go in my whs

probably going to be running 6 3TB drives off it

i think raid 5 would be the best way to go? or raid 50 maybe?

cheers

rpstewart · 28 Feb 2011 at 21:10

Original Windows Home Server or the new one without the drive pooling?

If it's the former then do you need RAID5, I would have thought the drive pooling would do the trick. That would mean that all you'd need would be lots of SATA ports whether they be motherboard or plain add in card ones.

Back to the question though, you won't find a 6 port card, they tend to come in multiples of 4 so you're looking at an 8 port card, the usual recommendation is a Dell Perc 5 or 6 card off eBay. Anything else is going to be pretty pricey, even low end cards will set you back the best part of £200.

SoundEng · 28 Feb 2011 at 21:13

well i am hoping to run the new one without drive pooling, because of the remote media streaming and being based on svr 2008 etc..... ok i will have a look on the bay

would you say raid 5 would be best? or 50? or anything else?

ta

rpstewart · 28 Feb 2011 at 21:20

It depends what you want out of the storage solution - speed (remember a single HDD will saturate GigE), space, redundancy?

SoundEng · 28 Feb 2011 at 21:24

well what i want to do is be able to record HD tv over gigE and write it direct to the array. The server (which is an old p4 2.5gb ram, another question would this be too underpowered for the array or does it not matter?) the server has 4 gigabit load balancing failover connections, so i think that should stop the gigE saturation?
i want to have redundancy as well because the server will be used to store other things too (work and music etc)

thanks again

Pandobear · 1 Mar 2011 at 18:47

If you are using the new WHS, you may want to look at the 3rd party Drive Extender plugins that are becoming available. I am using one called Drive Bender which works pretty well, it uses a NTFS file system on each drive, so you retain direct access to your data, should the pool fail, which is less stress inducing than RAID5. RAID5 is all about system uptime, and keeping your data accessible when a single drive fails. It really doesn't replace backing up your data, so in actual fact depending on how important your data is, you may be better off purchasing a backup solution (external drives, second machine) instead of a hardware raid card. If keeping your data online at all times is important then RAID5/6 is the way to go, as you can replace a drive without taking the machine offline.