Some suggestions/opinions on my storage dilemma

[Grimmda]

I need some advice…

At home I have a Dell 600SC. It’s got a 2.4Ghz P4/533fsb, 1GB ECC/Parity RAM and Server 2000 Advanced.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe600sc/en/ug/1r234c10.htm#1031041

It works great!

This motherboard has 3 IDE Channels and currently on it I have:

Channel 1
OS Drive (20GB)
DVD ROM

Channel 2
120GB WD/8MB Cache
120GB WD/8MB Cache

Channel 3
160GB Maxtor/8MB Cache
DVD+/- RW Sony DRU500A

Something like this layout I believe. Really the layout doesn’t matter. Anyway I’ll get to the point.

I don’t have any RAID going on (and no SCSI options currently), they are all setup as independent disks and I have a LOT of data on them I’d hate to lose after all these years.
I need a solution that would give me some redundancy and would obviously like to get larger drive for more capacity and growth.

I’ve contemplated going with 3 or 4, 400GB IDE Drives and just doing software raid which I know is slow but I don’t really care as it’s mainly just me accessing the data on this device. But I don’t want to waste my time with this method if it really isn’t feasible for me to ever “swap a drive out and expect to recover my array”.

I’m looking for opinions and suggestions on what route I can go. I'll provide any additonal information I can as requested. Obviously I would like to keep this as cost effective as possible. (I'd like to try and do it for under $500 or $750 if possible)

[Grimmda]

Hmmm no ideas... I've looked and including shipping I can score 3 400GB Seagate IDE's for $200 a piece and do the software RAID with Windows and be done with it... $600 total. Not bad...

[codename47]

I'm going to be selling my 1640 highpoint 4 port SATA which would probably be more reliable and faster than the windows based raid on IDE... I'd really look at the fs/ft forum and pick up a cheap card that does raid 5. I'm also selling a SX6000 raid card that holds 6 IDE drives for 110$ right now. There are options out there that will get you better performance and really worth the money.

I think 400GB drives are sweet though and I'm selling all of my 250GB drives for a couple of 400GB drives.. actually I've sold 5 of 9 so far. Raid is the way to go and large drives in a simple raid 5 set up gives a little redundancy and pretty descent speed. If you go software raid with onboard controllers that wil work fine too but look a little bit b/c you could always go wtih 320GB drives and a controller for close to the same space but have more expandability.

[RogerX]

Hardware RAID is typically faster, but software RAID in 2000 server works fine -- *** AS LONG AS YOU HAVE ONLY ONE DEVICE PER IDE CHANNEL! *** :)

I learned this the hard way trying to hook up 2 onboard drives on same channel, and 4 drives to a promise card. My first array, 6x 80GB Maxtors back 5-6 years ago. Performance was absolutely horrible. Got a refurbed 3ware hardware RAID card on eBay, so much faster!

But yes, as long as you are not putting the OS on the array, software RAID in Windows lets you replace drives and rebuilt RAID 5 arrays in Disk Management.