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Advice needed...

D

Donnelltech

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 11, 2004
Messages
80
I currently am running a small file server that has 2*200GB Seagate SATA150 drives in a mirror off of my motherboard's onboard raid controller. I use an older 40gb PATA drive as my server 2k3/programs drive. The RAID array is purely for storage. I have pretty much completely exhausted the storage space on my existing array and the wife has given me the go-ahead to expand... but she is kind of tight with the purse strings so I have to do it without spending a ton of money. I know that I am going to purchase 2 Seagate 250GB or 300GB SATA drives. I will also need a seperate controller card as my board only has 2 ports for SATA. Redundancy of the data is crucial, beyond even disk throughput. I cannot afford to lose any data for any reason. I figured My options are as followes:

1) Buy the new drives and 2port controller and create additional mirror array adding 250-300GB of additional Storage. Total of around 450-500GB storage.

2) Buy 2 new 200GB drives and controller, but break existing mirror and create a 4 disk RAID 5 array using Server2k3 software raid. Results, around 600GB total storage.

I could probably use the extra 100Gb that the raid 5 would give me, but the 200GB drives are barely any cheaper than the 300GB units and I feel a little safer using hardware RAID mirroring as It has worked flawlessly for me so far and I have never used a software RAID setup.

Any thoughts or suggestions? Total budget is no more than $300.00 but the lower the better.

Also, I have a fairly nice 400watt PSU running the show now. My Mobo is an older MSI KM400 chipset Matx with onboard everything. I currently have no expansion cards, 2*512mb ddr400, an athlon XP 1800+ with stock cooling, the previously mentioned drives 3 hard disks, a DVDRW, and 2 case fans. Will I also need to buy a beefier PSU to run the extra drives/controller card?

Thanks in advance for the help.

J
 
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