| Pat Regan on 31 Oct 2005 15:00:55 -0000 |
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Edmund Goppelt wrote: > My plan at this point is to roll my own linux based RAID system (i.e., > buy 4 SATA drives and stuff them into an disk array): > > 1 Addonics 4SA Disk Array: $120 I just looked up what this is, that isn't a bad idea at all. > 4 Seagate Barracuda 250s @ $107: $428 Do you want 1 TB of raw storage or usable storage? If you put 4 drives into a RAID 0 or JBOD you will be asking for trouble. Drive failures are pretty common, and if you lose a single drive your data will be gone. The cheapest way to get redundancy (when using more than 2 drives) is RAID 5. If you went with RAID 5 with the hardware you mentioned you'd get 750 GB. If you need more space you can either go with larger drives, or add more drives. At these prices it also wouldn't be a bad idea to pick up an extra drive as a spare. If you lose one drive, you'd be surprised how likely it will be that you will lose another while waiting for the RMA. RAID 5 has poor write performance, but should easily be as fast as your network. > I notice there are mass market NAS devices out there, but they seem to > start at around $1000 (e.g., this Buffalo product: > http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155306) and I > am not sure how well they handle drive failures. > This device has the same "problem" as your setup does. It is 1 TB of raw storage that can be configured as RAID 0 (1 TB Usable), RAID 5 (750 GB usable), or 2 250GB RAID 1 volumes. It also costs twice as much. You can use the difference to upgrade to 300-400GB drives to reach 1TB with redundancy. I am also a big fan of 3ware PATA and SATA RAID controllers. They are a bit pricey, but less hassle (and in most cases, faster) than software RAID. > Thanks in advance for your ideas, suggestions & comments. > You're welcome. I'd be happy to try to answer more :). Pat Attachment:
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