a few questions for a raid 5 box

[BombrMan]

Ok, so i bought 4 maxtor 200gb drives. I know maxtor may not be the greatest but at $50 new i couldn't pass it up. On top of that I have 2 other 200gb drives which are already in a raid 0 on my promise card in my computer. What I want to do is build a dedicated machine to use for network storage with a raid 5. Also, I can't clear my current raid 0, so I need to have the capability for online expansion so I can build the array with 4 discs and then copy the data over, and then add the other 2 discs. From what I've read, this is possible if the raid supports online expansion and it's formatted as a dynamic disk in windows.. The box will probably be running 2k3 server, which i think supports software raid 5. I don't want to do a hardware raid because the card costs money, and it would limit the number of drives i could put in in the future. My questions are:
1. Does the 2k3 software raid support online expansion? Also is there a better software raid solution out there than that?
2. What is the smallest case that will reasonably hold maybe 10 drives? 10 is my eventual maximum I think, since the mainboard I am looking at (asus p4p800 e deluxe) supports 10 hard drives total. I don't care if it sounds like a jet plane, but I need to be able to bring it to lan parties(leech festivals) which is why I want it as small as possible.
3. Can you guys recommend a power supply that's going to be able to handle that kind of load?

Thanks alot for any help you can provide.

-Richard

 

[Ender]

I did some digging around and this is what I found...

1) Although I dont suggest it I guess its possible to do software RAID-5 under Windows 2003, Tom's has a guide on how to do it for WinXP here. And you should be able to expand it BUT and this is a big but, something goes wrong with the OS and you're pretty much fucked. Since you're worried about your data I suggest you spend the cash now and make a good investment out of it.

2) Not really sure but I hear people raving over the Coolermaster Stacker and its ability to hold stuff. As much as space is an issue for your drives you should also make it a priority to make sure they stay cool. With that many drives in your system its going get hot in there, the cooler the drives run the less likely you are to have problems down the road.

3) For the power supply... I think you should figure out what kind of controller you are going to go with first, I say this because some controllers make it so not all drives spinup at the same time. You should figure that each drive spinning up takes 2A so you're looking at something with minimum of 20A on the 12V, then you need to figure in the rest of your peripherals.

I think you should settle on whats going to drive the array first and take it from there.