Cheap, Redundant Storage Array options

[Breadfan]

OK, so my file server is getting old, and I'm starting to look for some upgrades for it.

It's still running an ASUS A7V Socket A with a 900mhz Tbird chip, parts that at one point in time were my top of the line system years ago. :) I can't complain with this combo, it's run 24/7 for years with no issues.

It does appear that the disk controller on the A7V (the onboard Promise) is going bad, reading is OK but new data that is written to the drives is getting corrupted.

I may retire the old board to another machine, as I do have a few newer Socket A boards sitting around.

But mainly I want to upgrade the storage. I currently have 1 10gb drive used for the OS, and 1 200gb drive used for file storage.

I want to upgrade to more space and also redundant (i.e. RAID) space.

I figured the best thing would be an off-bard SATA card that supports RAID 5, software RAID is OK with me. But that way I can use 3-4 drives to get to about 1TB of space and be able to rebuild the array in the case of a spindle failure.

Has anyone done something similar, if so, what did you use or recommend? Should I get 3 300gb drives or 4 250gb drives? What SATA cards are recommended?

Keep in mind I will admit to wanting to build a large redudant array on the cheap, so cheaper solutions that work are preferred!

I could slap in a pair of 500gb drives but I worry the redundancy isn't there. Mirroring RAID is a solution but is wasteful in terms of space.

[uOpt]

I don't think these cheap SATA RAID cards are any better than the onboard stuff. The risk of not getting over a disk dropout in combination with reboots is just too big.

I'd say either get a real RAID card or do software RAID.

[Jon]

I've seen many members frown about using software RAID, but I've been using it for a few years. I'll admit it's not as fast as most true hardware solutions, but I personally would rather save a few bucks over buying a cheapo SATA RAID card that is basically using the same resources to do the same thing. I don't think alot of people realize that unless you buy a RAID card that has an onboard processor and memory that handles all parity processing and caching, it's not a real hardware-based RAID card. All you've really got is a controller that is setting up a logical disk array at the BIOS level instead of emulating one within Windows. The CPU is still doing all the work.

I won't argue that there is some additional overhead that is involved in doing pure Windows software RAID, but in my experience in comparison to cheap WinRAID cards, it's often quite neglible. Since you've already stated you want to stay on the cheap, just get an 8-port SATA card with no RAID and let Windows do the rest. If all this box is going to do is store files, I don't think it's going take a hit by doing some parity calculations.

The 8-ports give you plenty of expansion room. The only negative here is your OS. If you're not running a server OS, redundancy options go out the window, so you may be forced to go for a cheapo RAID card.

[Madwand]

Such old hardware is going to have significant performance limitations. An add-on storage controller would have to be PCI, as would a gigabit NIC. Moreover, the PCI performance on such older chipsets can be below standard PCI.

With this, you can (a) ignore the problem and live with lesser performance or (b) drop the idea of using the old hardware and build something newer.

[Breadfan]

Thanks for the responses, in terms of old hardware, I've got an 1800+ Athlon Tbred and ASUS A7N8X Delux NForce2 board I can use for this.

I can't recall what (if any) SATA it has onboard, but I'm perfectly willing to get an 8-port SATA card.

I was probably going to run Win2k Pro as thats what I have on the box right now. I don't have any server licenses that I can use at the moment. I could do Linux and SAMBA though, that's an option too.

Do the PCI cards come with decent software or BIOS level stuff for setting up a RAID 5 setup? How about their recovery options in case of disk failure?

There's lots of brands out there, I'd probably want to stick with a brand that has good software for what I want to use.

I'm not really concerned with the performance hit here, this will be an improvement over what I have anyway and I am able to do everything I need thusfar on my current setup. A bit more speed is welcome but not necessary at this point.

Having a big storage farm to dump home movies and disc backup ghost images to is really what I'm after.

No that being said I could toss my AIW 8500 card in this box and use it as a DVR as well, again I don't think requirements outweigh the performance of the hardware even if going for a DVR.

I'll do some Newegg browsing later and see what SATA cards are out there.

[Breadfan]

Checking newegg, it looks like 320gb is the "price point" these days. Going from 250 to 320gb is $10, but going from 320 to 400gb is $30-40 per drive.

So, 3x320 = 960mb, add a SATA card and I'm pretty much at 1tb for $300.

That's the sort of price point I'm looking at here, keep my 200gb as a system drive and other backup storage and I've officialy got 1160gb so I can gloat to my friends that I've got over a TB...yeah not so big a deal these days but gotta be official. :)

3x320 sufficient for Raid5? I know 3 drives is the bottom limit for Raid5, is there any good reason to go for 4 spindles instead?

[uOpt]

3x320 sufficient for Raid5? I know 3 drives is the bottom limit for Raid5, is there any good reason to go for 4 spindles instead?

It'll read a little faster, in particular small reads after random seeks and have more space. 3x320 raid5 = 640 GB, 4x320 = 960 GB. That's 50% more space for 30% more cost.

Or you can run the 4th drive as hot spare so that a degraded array is synced again.

Keep in mind all this might not work with onboard SATA raid or cheap cards. I can only second the recommendation to either go software RAID (which is very fast if you have enough CPU) or with a decent RAID controller.