How would this rig do for a software RAID5 fileserver?

[MikeHunt79]

I'm fed up with going thru folders of 100's of DVD's and CD to find what I want. So... I'm building a fileserver, as cheap as I can. I want to check it should all work ok before I spend the wonga on loads of hard disks.

Here's my specs...

Huge case with 4 320Gb SATA drives (probably seagate)
Encer 450W PSU modded with a 7v 80mm fan.
DFI Ultra infinity motherboard
Athlon XP-M underclocked to ~1800MHz at ~1.35v for low power consumption.
Aero7 Cooler with 120mm fan 7v
512mb of BH-5 ram. Could go with 1 gig but 512 uses less power.
ATI Radeon 7000 GFX card
Wireless card

I have all these parts apart from the hard disks.

I'm hoping the setup above would use less than 100w and be pretty quiet. I want to leave this on 24/7. I will be mostly accessing this over wifi, so I'm gonna be limited to 55Mbps which is a pain I can live with, and means the hard disks won't really need to be mega fast. I might remotely access this rig and maybe even use it to download large files.

Now, I've never tried a software RAID 5 setup, so I'm hoping the above would be fast enough... does anyone know how well the athlon XP would fare? Also, with RAID5 is it better to use the same hard disks EG 4 x seagate 7200.10's? I'm happy to use Linux as it should be more stable and give better performance.

 

[Valo]

In my experience software RAID 5 is very slow and an really eat into your system resources. Have a look and see if you can source a cheap PCI RAID Card as it would be money well spent in my view.
As for the hard disks, asn on any RAID system it's best to use identical disks, cuts down on any issues.

Performance wise that spec should make an excellent little file server.

Hope this helps

 

[MikeHunt79]

To be honest, the system resources on this rig will be pretty much free most of the time... The RAID should give it something to chew on... Just how slow could it be? I'll be mostly using it to backup data and probably stream music and video from, it should be able to cope with that shouldn't it? I'm hoping the wireless network will be the bottleneck here.

As for hard disks, I found WD do some specifically for RAID. I'm probably gonna go for them. If it does run to slow, I might have to get a RAID card after all.