Best solution for music storage! 1tb worth

spm_uk

spm_uk

spm_uk

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Joined
5 Dec 2004
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678
Hey all,

Im just putting together a media center pc and i want to create 1 huge drive for my music collection. I was wondering what would be the best (cheapest/quality) wise of putting together a RAID5 (security and backup reasons!) for a 1TB drive.

And would Raid 5 be the best solution

Cheers
 
well.

just as a idea. what iv done is i have two 160gb hdd's

and iv got a copy of my documents etc on one, and windows instalation on the other and important stuff.

and iv allso got a 320gb external hdd, which iv backed up everything from both onto it :)
 
spm_uk said:
Hey all,

Im just putting together a media center pc and i want to create 1 huge drive for my music collection. I was wondering what would be the best (cheapest/quality) wise of putting together a RAID5 (security and backup reasons!) for a 1TB drive.

And would Raid 5 be the best solution

Cheers
Click to expand...
Cheapest way would be 4 Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GBs.

Not a RAID expert, but found this an interesting read :)
 
spm_uk said:
Hey all,

Im just putting together a media center pc and i want to create 1 huge drive for my music collection. I was wondering what would be the best (cheapest/quality) wise of putting together a RAID5 (security and backup reasons!) for a 1TB drive.

And would Raid 5 be the best solution

Cheers
Click to expand...

RAID5 can be done cheaply if you're willing to accept that there are some limitations. The biggest problem with onboard RAID5 implementations is that they don't have any dedicated parity processing engines and hence the main CPU has to do it all. This means that any write activity is accompained by fairly high CPU usage, write speed also tends to be about 20Mb/s which is pretty poor when compared to single drives.

While this may be acceptable for a storage drive it's not ideal for a boot drive, especially if there's going to be a lot of activity on the page file. There is the option of looking for a board with a set of SATA ports for the RAID5 array and another set which could be used for a boot drive.

To get 1Tb of disk you're looking at 4*320Gb disks (RAID5 means losing the capacity of 1 drive) or 3*500Gb with the 320s being a fair bit cheaper. This leads to another problem, you might be struggling to find a decent looking HTPC case which can take 4 or 5 HDDs.
 
Grab loads of old second hand stuff, and make your own NAS bundle that on your network, have your media PC set up as normal, and boot as normal, but have it record and read music from the NAS. This also means any computer on your network has access too :)
 
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