Cheap RAID 5 Server

Intra-Agnostic

Intra-Agnostic

Intra-Agnostic

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Ammanford, Wales, UK.
Im in the process of setting up a cheap (as possible) raid server for media storage.

I currently have 4x250gb SATA drives, of which in RAID 5 , I understand will give me about 750GB.

Now my question , as i know nothing about RAID.
With a 4 channel controller, Can I have more than one controller in my pc ? Will this cause any issues?


As i expect 4 drives will not be enough to last more than a few months.
 
No, i wouldn't imagine you would have had any problems mate. I have ran both a highpoint rocket raid 133 & an adaptec SATA raid cards in the same rig before & never experienced any difficulty or conficts :)
 
The only (tiny) issue is knowing which card is which - it tends to go in order of IRQ as to which shows the options during boot first. Also bare in mind that a raid built with 1 controller will (usually) not work on another controller.

Next thing to think about is the bandwidth limits of PCI - the first raid could easy saturate it, the second will likely completely flood it.
Take a look at PCI-e based cards (depending what mainboard etc you have) as this should help clear the problems a little.
 
Just building a similar type of system myself, (4x 300Gb drives) but I'm going software raid on Linux, inititally.

The only problem you may get is what Mercutio said, if you are moving lots of data around and the controllers are on the PCI bus it will soon get saturated. PCI Express is better, due to the dedicated bandwidth that each lane has. However PCI-Express RAID adaptors are, a) crap (basically sata cards with a bit of logic) or b) expensive (full hardware raid cards).

Mine's just a storage system, and won't be getting too much use, I just wanted resilience on the data.

Oh, one other thing, try not to go beyond 4 drives in a single raid array, you'll start getting too much of a chance of 2 drives failing at the same time then, plus the cards are really expensive!
 
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Hi guys.

Thanks for the input.

The system will be running three media centers which i have located at various points around my house. As i live on my own, only one of them will be running at any one time so I assume PCI bandwidth shouldnt be to much of a problem?

With regards to boot order. Could i just use a normal ide harddrive for booting, and keep the RAID purely for storage?
 
Should be fine even with HD streaming will be limited by your network connection, and not the PCI Bus.

I'm using an internal 512Mb USB Flash drive for the OS, means I can run more hard drives, and is more power efficient, but you have to make sure you write to it as little as possible (move swap and temporary files to the raid array).
 
Hmm software raid 5 will cope with media streaming...

SuSE 9.3 and use EVMS too.

My Barton 2500 and 512Mb of ram (all at stock) is comfortably running samba, two apache servers, mysql and still doesn't have problems streaming or acting as a file server for two users...
I have 6x200Gb drives - 5 in RAID5 with the 6th as hotswap.
 
If you have a PCI-E bus, as said, this would be much better. The HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 4 port, PCI-e x4 can be had for £125 and the 8 port version for £215. Given that this is on a dedicated PCI-E bus, there will be 1GB/s bandwitdh each way - even with and 8 drive RAID0 you cannot saturate it :D. I suppose it depends on the budget because that is not a cheap card.
 
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