Computer geeks - anyone know about RAID?

Something like this?

http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/ast4.asp

 

A Raid 5 solution will give you hot-swappable fail-over, not really an increase in storage size. You could probably rig a couple based on what you already have but it's best to have each Raid 5 made up with 3 like drives (unless you're using something like the Addonics that Korr mentioned above).

For media you might want to look into a 4Gbit Fibre Channel using a Terabyte SAN for the required QoS, storage and through-put.

 

That's just a plug-in sata card with an external sata connection, pretty cheap but crappy software raid, probably not too horrible on a PCI-E 1x card, but not great.

 

http://www.directron.com/mb561s4s.html

You'll also need an e-sata PCI card, but they're cheap at Fry's Electronics

Here's another one that holds 3 drives, and is hot swappable too:

http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4500867

Also, they have this huge 8 bay tower for external hard drives at Fry's. It was pretty cheap, considering, but I don't recall exactly how much it was.

 

You are making it way too complicated. You should be using at least 500gb drives, not 250gb. They make them all the way up to 800gb. If you want to go the external route you are technically only limited by the amount of power your computer can supply to the USB drives. Only use storage racks if you are going to use store massive amounts of data, 10tb+ at least. Linking older computers together can be done if you are on a budget bot for ease of use stuffing 800gb drives in a computer is IMO the best route to go unless you want to spend a lot more money. Ive been doing this stuff since I was 8 so I can probably answer any questions you have.

 

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He already bought all the drives in the original post

 

why would you want raid 5 for a media PC? unless you REALLY want to save your porn in the event of hardware failure, you don't need parity.

 

Couple things:

You mentioned having 2TB of external storage. If you're going to do four disk RAID 5 arrays, you're only going to end up with 750GB per array, as the RAID overhead eats up one disk worth of space.

There are raid controllers that will let you do JBOD (literally, just a bunch of disks) without sacrificing any space to overhead, but if any single drive fails, your entire array is toast. Definitely not reccomended.

The big thing to keep in mind is that ultimately, the RAID controller itself is the most important component. You want a dedicated hardware RAID controller, and based on your comments need one that will allow for the expansion of existing arrays. The ability to hot-swap drives (if it matters) is controller dependant as well.

I turned up a few external RAID arrays with built-in controllers, but none that will give you much expansion room. And even at that, you're still around the $1500 mark without drives.

I think the least expensive way of doing this would be to forget the idea of an external array entirely. Buy a large enough PC case to house all the drives and a quality 8+ port SATA RAID controller. That should be doable for $600 or so depending on what you end up with.

 

He absolutely needs some redundancy unless he's got an extremely good method of backing up a couple TB of data on a regular basis.

What's the alternative if you don't do RAID with some form of parity? Either keep each drive separate which means he's got a ton of different drive volumes making organizing files rather difficult, or pool the drives together as JBOD and be in a situation where any single drive failure takes every bit of data with it. Neither is a good situation.

If you're going to put the time into building a media server, ripping CDs, ripping DVDs, time-shifting TV, etc., you're not going to want to see all that stuff disappear due to one drive failing. Drives DO fail. Plan for it and it's not a big deal. Fail to plan for it and it can become a huge issue.

 

Just FYI, hot swap is controller specific. RAID has nothing to do with hot swapping drives.

 

Raid 0 ftw.

Anything else is just womanly.

 

If your download alot of stuff and planeing to have your computer for a long time then get the 500 gb or the (250GB ATA HDD internal)

 

If you want lots of storage get the Maxtor 1TB external hard drives or better yet get 2.

 

I still do my backups to floppy.

RAID firewire floppy array can't be beat.

 

Raid 0 or not?

 

Probably because there's no market for it. Most people are pretty content at home with one drive in their PC and increasingly an external USB drive for backup, if they even bother.

On the corporate side of things, anyone who needs TB of storage is likely doing so with a SAN, and even though iSCSI and SATA drives have brought down the entry price point considerably as compared to FibreChannel and SCSI, we're nowhere near this being an affordable home option.

The good news I suppose is that Microsoft has in beta a "home" version of Windows Server, which is designed specifically to be a fileserver for media. I suspect that will start to push the market in this direction, as more and more people are centralizing large quantities of storage at home and it increasingly makes sense to have a proper server that can be accessed by all your PCs, XBOX, etc.

 

Mike,

Are you changing your data often? If not, why don't you just buy a couple of drives as backups and backup the movies you want, and store the drives? You said yourself drives are cheap. So, take your movies, etc., that you want to keep and back them up offsite. That way they are protected from more than just a drive failure.

I think you are more likely to have a drive failure running a RAID configuration.