IdiotInCharge
NVIDIA SHILL
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2003
- Messages
- 14,675
One more parting thought: I do not like spending money on mechanical spinners, and frankly, I don't need that much space these days. So I have a ton of existing 2TB hard drives and I like to put them in a RAID.
Check out Storage Spaces if you haven't. For reliability and repair purposes as well as speed (sustained and random), it makes little sense to use more than RAID1 these days, and Storage Spaces will run mirrors at full cumulative drive speed all day. So you can build a 'pool' out of pairs of mirrors and be done with it, if you like. Further, there's almost no benefit to using 'hardware' RAID controllers for smaller installations and for 'NAS' functionality. The performance isn't there, and something like Storage Spaces (or a number of *nix alternatives) is / are absolutely portable between operating system installs.
At worst, you can check it out pretty quickly with whatever you have available and see if it's something that might work for you.