Data Storage System Buy List

[Trogdor2012]

Okay, so I've been donig my best for a while now to back up all the movies and videos I've downloaded from torrents over the past few years with good sucess. I've yet to lose anything of value despite a hard drive crash and theft of an entire desktop tower.

My current system is something of a "do everything" rig, sporting high powered graphics, plenty of ram, and more storage space than most people need. I am NOT most people.

The time has come for me to consolidate this whole mess onto a massive raid 6 array for the sake of simplifying my backup procedures and for added data redundancy. Just having 2 copies of the data on different disks isn't going to cut it for much longer.

I have already gone ahead and purchased two 5 in 3 hot swap drive bays by Chenbro, and now I just need to decide which drives and hardware raid card I plan to get. I plan to expand to 3 bays in the near future (total capacity of 15 drives), and more in the future depending on what mods I am willing to make to my case. As I will be replacing the motherboard/processor in the near future, hardware level is the best option since I can easily migrate it to a new computer just by moving the card and all the drives.

The SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB seems like a good enough drive. Cool and quiet is the way I want to go. I already know the WD drives lack firmware features needed if you plan to Raid them, so that entire brand is out, since I cannot afford the RE4 class drives.

The eagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB 5900 RPM 32MB is another contender in the same price range as the Samsung. IT has a lower rating, however, so reliability is something I worry about.

As for the Raid card itself, I have been looking at the Areca 1280ML card. I've heard nothing but good things about this card. Who here has personal experience with it? What are your thoughts on it? Any quirks I should know about? I am currently planning on 2TB per drive times 10 drives, but since it supports 24 drives, can the card handle 48TB of data in a single volume?

 

[tormentum]

The card can handle volumes larger than 2TB, so it will do 48TB just fine. Make sure you can back it up though. When a 48TB volume goes bust, you'll want to recover it.

Also, 24 drives in a raid volume is scary. The rebuild time on that would be horrendous. I'd carve it up into smaller volumes to be honest. You can still pool them together in Windows or Linux or whatever you end up using. It'll just reduce the rebuild time required should a disk die.

Researching a new system can be fun and daunting. I've been doing the same myself. I've outgrown my Openfiler linux raid SAN. I'm going for ZFS personally. I need the ability to use iSCSI targets as well as use the device as a straight NAS. Block level checksumming is nice too. Good luck!

 

[odditory]

Read. the. forum. first. Every question will be answered.

 

[Trogdor2012]

I realize you guys have quite a spat of threads lately with users demanding the experts helpt them find their perfect drive, and have made a thread to mock them, as they should be.

However, I have already done most of the leg work. I have narrowed my list of possible drives/cards to only 1 or 2 choices. I am here, and recently signed up with this forum, for the sole purpose of finding out if there are any last minute bits of information that could sway me one way or another. Is there an incompatibility I overlooked? A better product I may have missed? etc.

I've seen and skimmed the Areca thread, and most posts were about card series I was not looking at, or anticipation of new models that have only recently come out and don't fit my needs/budget. I don't really want to wade through 30 pages of posts to find a few tidbits here and there regarding the 1230 to 1280 series cards, which doesn't seem to be talked about much here.