building home NAS - which raid card?

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mkrohn

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which 8 port raid card should I get? I'm building initially a 4 * 4tb raid 5 but I plan on expanding it to 8 drives as time goes on. The 4 drives I can cool properly in my previous desktop case but once it jumps up to 8 I need to move to a more NAS friendly case. I plan on using an SSD for the boot drive. I have some laying around not presently in use.

This is primarily storage for home media. I plan later either having a separate "compute" box with dual 6 or 8 core Xeons. The box will be mostly plex to replace my desktop filling this role which currently is a xeon E5-2670. I have 5 kids and increasing media consumption demands from the various devices as the oldest is about to turn 14. I really can't have my desktop serving this purpose much longer. The DVR and comskip stuff runs enough that it gets in my way often.

I'd prefer these being combined as one machine but I'm afraid of singular point of failure.
 
Personally i'd say either no raid card or something like the IBM M1015 or the aforementioned M1115 - something you can throw in "IT Mode" so you can use software raid.

Why software RAID? You aren't stuck with the one controller, if it fails you just throw any old thing in there to keep going.
 
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well crap after some reading I had no idea it had become useless. I have 6 ports on the asrock Z87 killer motherboard I planned on using meaning the boot SSD and 4 drives I planned on using will all fit just fine.

What do you do if the motherboard dies? the boot OS handles it? Should I just use freenas and do a boot USB stick?
 
mkrohn said:
well crap after some reading I had no idea it had become useless. I have 6 ports on the asrock Z87 killer motherboard I planned on using meaning the boot SSD and 4 drives I planned on using will all fit just fine.
Click to expand...

It´s not that its useless, but with faster CPU and mightier chipsets, why hardware raid ?

mkrohn said:
What do you do if the motherboard dies? the boot OS handles it? Should I just use freenas and do a boot USB stick?
Click to expand...

You just have to have a compatible chipset (like all intels are, LSi too i believe), if so i´ts just PnP. They even recognize the later array.
 
well.. I guess i know what I'm putting together tonight.

Next you'll tell me that I can use various sized drives too.
 
mkrohn said:
well.. I guess i know what I'm putting together tonight.

Next you'll tell me that I can use various sized drives too.
Click to expand...

*cough* heh, well you kinda can and without a Drobo. Though I forget which software does it. Three choices come to mind, one of which will do that: Stablebit Drivepool, Flexraid and Drive Bender.
 
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