750GB IDE drives for RAID - what controller card can I use?

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Dougbert

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May 29, 2006
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I think I have done a bonehead move. I had two 400GB hard drives (IDE) and one 750GB hard drive (also IDE). I decided I wanted to take my old AMD 3200+ box and turn it into a simple mirrored storage box. So, I bought two more 750GB IDE drives and (I still need to get one more). The plan is to put all four 750GB drives on a RAID controller and mirror each pair. Then, I was either going to get a second card and mirror the two 400's or just put them on separate onboard IDE ports and do a software mirror (the O/S is Win2003 Server). The boot drive is a 250GB drive.

What PCI cards actually support 750GB IDE hard drives? Should I just get a good IDE controller do everything via the software? I'd prefer not to have proprietary formats also. Basic NTFS seems find to me.

I am not looking for super performance although that would be nice. I'm looking for reliable longer term storage that I don't have to back up to another location. I have a lot of music ripped (over 5,000 albums with another 1000 left to rip), all my family pictures, home movies, etc. I have already gone through one devastating loss of movies of people (now deceased) of which I was unable to recover all of the data and I do not want to go through that again. I also will be running backups from my PC's to this box on a nightly basis.

Opinions? Advice? Help?
 
Thanks... I had already looked up the drive compatiblity at the 3ware site (I also visited Promise) and they don't list any large drives on their lists. I'm concerned that there may not actually be any cards out there that support 750GB hard drives.
 
That may be the case or it may be that the specifications were written before those size drives were around and nobody at the company has a vested interested in updating marketing materials for a product that is past end of sales life.
 
general said:
That may be the case or it may be that the specifications were written before those size drives were around and nobody at the company has a vested interested in updating marketing materials for a product that is past end of sales life.
Click to expand...

This is probably the situation. ATA controllers with 48-bit LBA can address over 100 petabytes (100,000 gigs). It's probably the simple matter of the cards / documentation came out before the large drives (which only came out relatively recently).

Dougbert said:
I think I have done a bonehead move. I had two 400GB hard drives (IDE) and one 750GB hard drive (also IDE). I decided I wanted to take my old AMD 3200+ box and turn it into a simple mirrored storage box. So, I bought two more 750GB IDE drives and (I still need to get one more). The plan is to put all four 750GB drives on a RAID controller and mirror each pair. Then, I was either going to get a second card and mirror the two 400's or just put them on separate onboard IDE ports and do a software mirror (the O/S is Win2003 Server).
Click to expand...

Have you considered doing RAID-5 with the 750GB drives? If you use a 4-drive RAID-5 array, you can get 2.25TB of storage, with "good" write speed and "great" bulk transfer speed (similar to a RAID-0), with the redundancy of RAID-5. Or you could do a 3-drive RAID-5 with hot-spare for extra security (same capacity as 2 pair of RAID-1, in one contiguous volume, with higher read performance).

I believe Win2003 Server can do software RAID-5. Linux should also be capable if you choose to go that route (Ubuntu 6.10 is a good linux for beginners)
 
Thanks for the extra information. I was starting to think that I should probably just assume that anything that has 48 bit addressing is going to be fine but you never know.

As far as the RAID-5 is concerned, I looked at it a little bit but the hardware in my house tends to be very liquid and morph into other machines and sometimes moves around with me. I would rather have an array where I could pull a drive and put it in another machine (or an external box) if I needed to take a large chunk of data with me and not worry about it being in some proprietary format. With the striping, in the RAID-5 configuration, I lose that temporary "take it with me" ability because of the way RAID-5 works.
 
No data on a HD should be considered safe.. Heck the only data I consider safe is data that I have backed up 14 ways from Sunday at work. Consider backing up the really important stuff to tape or DVD or some such, even though it will take a long time, it is worth the peace of mind.
 
I'm right there with ya. My current backup of COMPRESSED data is just under 900GB. I did one backup....and do ya blame me? That, at least, gives me a quasi-safe feeling of peace of mind. Do you know how long it takes to back up to about 200 DVD's?!? It is absolutely insane. And the management alone to track where I was along the backup was a nightmare....because I would start and stop and do work along the way, it took weeks. Did I bother to right down what was on what disc? No. It's my catastrophic backup.

I think I need to look and see what tape backups can give me too. I just ass-umed that if I had a good mirrored backup system, I had a reasonably safe expectation of data safety. It's part of the reason I steer clear of RAID-5. I don't want striping. I want as much data safety as possible.
 
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