Raid Card & Array Advice

[Netvyper]

Currently, i've ~800gb of data spread accross half a dozen drives, and its in a right mess. Additionally, I've no backup of a large portion of the data.

My plan is to shell out about £500 on a RAID5 Array, built around 320gb Seagate SATA Disks. Having not build an array on a proper scale before (only raid0 onboard stuff), Im hoping to garner some advice

What Card?
I was thinking about a 4 port card... with 4 disks, if a drive falls over, I can power down the array until i get a spare in there, its not time-critical data.
Howerver I was then thinking about expansion in future, and wondering if its possible to just add drives to a raid5 array & increase the space? so perhaps an 8 port card might work better?

The other reason for an 8 port is a hot spare, if this is a really good idea.

Basically, i need to secure my data, and improving read speeds is a bonus too. Am I going about it the right way?

 

[Netvyper]

Yeah, sounds fairly sensible. RAID5 will give you good read speed and reliabiliy but writes aren't great even with a decent card based solution but by the sound of things you're only looking for storage so no real issue.

Yep, that was my thinking, its a lot of media files & so forth, so its mostly written once & left

A 4 port card might be a bit limiting in that you'll only get 960Gb with 4*320Gb disks, with 800Gb to store there's not a huge amount of headroom there. An 8 port card will give you room for expansion, most cards will support online array expansion which allows you to add another disk into the array and expand the available space (still need partition magic to do the windows side though).

Glad you said that... my maths was dodgy Was thinking i'd come out with > 1tb... looks like definately being an 8 port card then... any recomendations on what sort of thing?
hmm, also im not a fan of partition magic, especially with that sort of data on the line, i've had one or two failures with it...
Perhaps it'll be a case of save for another couple of months and go for a full 8 disks at once...

Hot spares are an interesting issue, there's a good argument for using RAID6 rather than 5 if you only have one array in the machine because it gives a better failover if a drive goes than RAID5 but decent RAID6 cards start at about £500.

Thats a bit above my price bracket :s, I will have a look around though.

 

[Netvyper]

aye, i've been checking out the other threads around
thanks for your input

 

[Netvyper]

smids; Aye, i was looking at that... it is costly, but it should last a few (5?) years
If I get one, is it worth using the raid6? I've heard a few horror stories about raid6... (specifically an e-mail service who switched over, and had ~3 weeks downtime, rebuiling their servers from backups)

http://www.icydock.com/product/mb455spf.html <==
Any thoughts on these things?
Likely to cause more problems than they solve? or a must have for any large array?

 

[Netvyper]

well, i've looked around, and my thinking is probably towards the rocketraid...
the machine will be dedicated (or close to) simply serving files, so some CPU usage doesnt worry me. As nice as the Areca card is, It puts the array outside of my budget really .

I assume an A64-3500 wont hit 100% when playing with a rocketraid?
any thoughts on the hot-swap bay?