Need at least 6TB of space, possible to have redundancy without buying 6xdrives?

[jivetrky]

I have to upgrade my media server/HTPC. Right now I have ~4.5TB and it's almost totally full. I'm hoping that I can revamp things when tax time comes around.

I want at LEAST 6TB, preferrably 8TB for a little more lifetime. But I would also really like to have some redundancy in the event of failure. The ability to just add drives later would also be awesome but I assume I'm getting into higher cost with that hope.

Right now I just have 4 separate drives with the media split up between them (I use media browser so it aggregates them all into a single list, so the front end still looks good)
But even on the back end I'd really love to just have one large volume, I assume this is possible on WIn7 64bit? How can I accomplish this and have data redundancy? I'm not a RAID wiz, is there some other array type besides RAID1 which would give me redundancy without having to double the amount of drives to purchase?

I already assume I will have to buy a controller, what would be a good cost effective recommendation.

I figured I'd get as many Samsung Spinpoint F4's (2TB) as I need because they are decent drives and cheap.

Can anyone help me get a list of what I need?

Thanks guys!

 

[Psykoikonov]

Not an expert but Raid 5 using four 2TB drives would yield 6TB total (or five 2TB drives for 8TB total). Raid 5 has redundancy (parity), I believe it also has the ability to add more drives as more space is required. Hopefully some with more experience will chime in.

Standard RAID levels wiki

Edit: for a controller, I'm guessing a PCIe slot (4x or 8x) is available. Then probably something like a HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 PCI Express x4, or a areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8. Both have support for up to 8 SATA II drives and Online Capacity Expansion and Online RAID Level Migration.

 

[tom10167]

It's kind of a bummer mass storage doesn't increase at the same rate video cards do, or maybe it does and it just isn't as obvious.

In any case 3TB drives are in existence, albeit very expensive. newegg and zzf carry them.

 

[jivetrky]

It's kind of a bummer mass storage doesn't increase at the same rate video cards do, or maybe it does and it just isn't as obvious.

In any case 3TB drives are in existence, albeit very expensive. newegg and zzf carry them.

I did see that the egg has 3TB drives. But 2TB drives are available for $80 but the 3TB's are still at $200. So it seems to make more sense to get 4TB for $160 instead of 3TB for $200. At least until I get to where I run out of ports.

 

[Randyman...]

And you also have the 3TB compatibility issues to deal with.

I'm also looking to expand my RAID-6 with the Samsung 2TB's at some point. They seem to be the best RAID drives for the buck (I can't use "Greens" on my Areca RAID controllers AFAIK)...

 

[Bad ConNecTioN]

I just got 3 Samsung HD204UI (2tb F4) drives up and running in RAID 5. This gives me 4TB usable on 3 drives, and single drive redundancy. I wouldn't use a Raid 5 setup for anything 8tb or over...for that I suggest RAID 6 for dual drive redundancy. This is because the of the super long rebuild times (over a day) associated with RAID 5 (and 6). During rebuilds on raid 5, if you loose another drive the array is lost. Rebuild times go up with a larger array...so eventually raid 5 simply becomes impractical. Raid 6 gives you a nice buffer with dual drive redundancy.
Note, external backups are still a good idea as raids aren't foolproof.

I'm still trying to determine the best stripe and cluster size, but here are some benchmarks with various settings. This is on an Intel ICH10R southbridge, with the various settings noted in the picture. Of anyone has some insight, I'd be delighted to hear it. This is going to serve as a media storage box. Not network access...just securing all my files and movies. I have seperate boot and program drives too, so only static data will exist on this array.