home server, raid 3 or 5?

[Como]

those prices scare me, i think this is getting out of hand...i mean, 2 more drives are what, $80 apiece? but those cards are, well, as much as a high end video card...i was looking to put no more than $200 at this whole thing...maybe software raid is more my deal? those cards are jsut way too expensive for me....as much as i'd love them.

Also, i wasnt thinking sata, i was thinking IDE. my current drive is IDE, and i'm not the biggest fan of sata, although it is cool... are IDE controlelr cards any cheaper?

 

[JCLW]

SATA tends to be cheaper because the boards are easier to make (considerably less traces)

For ~$90 for can pick up a Highpoint software XOR card that will handle up to eight drives. You don't get stuff like online drive expansion 'tho, and you'll need a fast system. http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-115-016&depa=0

Cheapest Hardware XOR will probably be the Promise SX4000 for ~$150. http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=16-102-012&DEPA=0

 

[attack]

See como, RAID 5 is the best choice for data redundancy and loss of overhead. However, with IDE drives the cost of the RAID 5 controller can outway the cost of the overhead loss of a RAID 10 setup. with hi end SCSI drives costing 500+ a pop, spending 500+ on a controller is definetly the way to go. (not to mention the 6+ drive setups are not uncommon)

You also might be making this very complicated. 320 dollars would get you 2 250gb 7200rpm IDE drives, put em in RAID 1 and you got 250gb of redundant storage.
Want 500 gigs? run a 10 setup (which is even faster) and your at 640 dollars

Now you can find cheap RAID 5 controllers for around 100 bucks, but I would recomend staying away from those (very slow and not many options) and get a nice one like a 3ware escalade (300+ I think).
So say you pickup a one of those controllers and 3 250gb drives, your spending around 800 bucks for 500gb of storage which is not as fast as the 10 setup. If you goto 4 drievs your at 950 and 750gb of storage, then it's cheaper to goto RAID 5....but your 750gb of storage.

Your best bet is to figure out how much space you want, and figure out the cost to RAID 5 it compared to RAID 10ing it.

If your still unsure, tell us how much you want to spend and how much space you want and the people here can crank out some ideas and numbers for ya.

Good luck!

 

[Como]

okay, well, the thing is i'm unemployed at the moment, moving, and going to college in the fall, on top of getting my licence soon and needing a car.

Money is definately the issue, i thought i may be abel to throw together some sort of cheap system that would be reliable....
and large enough for my stuff...i'd like 250 gigs or more, but it has to be recoverable, i dont want to lose a bit.
While i've never had a drive fail on me, i curently have everythnig important to me on a single drive, and it erks me...jsut reading about peoples horror stories makes me want to back up, but burning 100+ gigs to cd's just isnt cool, especially when i go and modify most of it within the next month anyway.

SO, with that said, lets say i can get 3 more 120GB drives like my 120. Then i'd have four identical drives, would it be possible to put them on the four IDE cables of a computer, and use both the drives on one channel as a single drive, and then use the fourth as a mirror? (not afraid to learn linux or other if i have to)

or maybe software raid3?

as much as i'd love to set up a real nice server, i just cant do it because of money...so i have to cheap out here.

Any good fileserver on-the-cheap suggestions? possibly some day in a year or so i'll be abel to get funs for a nice card and some new drives. thats not today

 

[JTanczos]

Maybe its just me but ide stay far far far away from software raid. 99% of the time you cant boot right into it and if your OS drive decides to die and you loose the settings for the raid you pretty much lost everything anyway. That is unless you can rebuild the array using the EXACT same settings. Only option there is to RAID 1 your OS drive. So you would need 2 smaller drives dedicated to the OS.

I bought the Promise SX6000 off of ebay for $130 and it ran fine with the drives I connected to it. Going to set up raid 5 with 6 200gig drives. Write speeds arnt important to me.

Raid 1, 0+1,10 you loose 50% of the data but always have an exact copy on the other drives. Up to 2 drives can fail if on seperate ends of the top array.
http://www.ebabble.net/assets/images/RAID_0_1.gif
http://www.ebabble.net/assets/images/RAID_10.gif

When doing Raid 5(and 3/4 if I remember correctly) you gotta remember this (N*S)-S=T.... N=Number of drives. S=Size and T=Total. You will always loose 1 drive worth of space to raid 3/4/5 partiy bits. Raid 5 has better fault tollerence as the parity bits are held on one drive but are spread out on each drive. Also raid 3/4 will suffer from bottlenecks on the parity drive.

http://www.ebabble.net/assets/images/RAID_3.gif
http://www.ebabble.net/assets/images/RAID_5.gif

Might want to think of how it would stream video as you could purchase a LAN ready DVD/Media Player that can access movies/music off the server.

JT

 

[donny_paycheck]

This may be of some use: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20040625/index.html