Cheap RAID Solution?

[georgiosd]

Hello everyone,

I need large amounts of storage (around 2TB at the moment growing) and as you can understand backing up such large amounts is difficult so I was thinking about considering RAID solutions.

Now, RAID-1 would probably not be cost effective, RAID-5 sounds much more plausible. Does anyone know of any cheap enclosure with RAID? The only ones I could find were £300+.

Thanks
Georgios

 

[JonJ678]

Raid is not a back up.

Raid 5 is excellent, I'm running a four disk raid 5 at present. One of the drives has died and it's running quite happily with only three drives out of four. Should rma that sometime.

External enclosures are indeed expensive. I built a matx computer for about 200 quid instead, and have a far more useful box as a result. Can you not just put four drives in your current computer and run them off the motherboard? Cheapest by far, I just don't have space in my main computer for the drives.

 

[rixarena]

yeah the best solution to use a computer for the raid, there are loads of easy ways to do it and there are good OSs like open filer and freeNAS to help convert it. you can get cheap 750gb spinpoints and use them in software raid 5 or get a motherboard that has hardware support which will make things quicker and possibly only a bit more in cost. raid 10 is an acceptable raid and you get a lot more performance from it than raid 5.

Regards Sam

 

[georgiosd]

Hm... first of all thanks for the responses.

Now, two questions:

- I understand RAID-5 is not a backup but it allows data recovery if one hard drive crashes, correct?

- I'd be looking for something that is small. With four drives I doubt it would be small enough to carry around but something that is small enough to hide under a TV table (and equally silent) would be ideal.

Any recommendations on that note?

Thanks again

 

[master811]

You'll be wanting something like a Drobo or other small NAS device which will accept 4 drives.

A cheap file server PC will normally be cheaper, but will use more power, and probably be noisier than a dedicated NAS, so it's a case of how much you want to spend? But no, there aren't really any 'cheap' NAS devices around, at least not ones that will take 4 drives.

 

[JonJ678]

Unlikely to be noisier. A nice, thick steel case with an atom board and four hard drives would only make noise from the drives, and that can be almost completely reduced with care. It wont use more power either.

That's not quite how raid 5 works. If one drive fails mechanically it's dropped from the array and your computer alerts you to this. The array keeps on working as before, but a bit more slowly. After you replace the drive and put it back in, it rebuilds and continues as before.

Raid 5 does not protect against:
Data corruption
User stupidity
Multiple simultaneous drive failure
Failure of motherboard controller

If you go down this route, I recommend linux with mdadm for the raid controller. This way if parts die, recovery is only as complex as plugging the drives into any computer running linux. If you use the 'hardware' option in the bios and the board dies you have to find an identical motherboard and pray for a bit

 

[neil_g]

- I understand RAID-5 is not a backup but it allows data recovery if one hard drive crashes, correct?

correct. however NEVER use RAID as a single point of backup.

i have had RAID controllers fail (server level items) and when that happens all attached disks are toast and require a restore from tape.