Five 3.5" bays - what to do?

V

Val

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 1, 2005
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299
Im getting a Lion Li S80 case with Asus P5K3 and 5 hard drive bays (maybe 6) with good cooling. Computer is used for everything - work, games, movies etc... So it needs to be fast, reliable and have a few TB of storage.

How would you recommend i fill up these 5 bays? Money being no object (within reason :p) I was thinking simply RAID 5 of 5 barracudas 7200.10. 3TB of storage, nice speed and some redundancy.

Do i need a separate RAID controller?
 
judging from the specs i see, P5K3 does not support Raid 5. So if you want Raid 5, you'll need a PCIe SATA or SAS Raid controller.
 
if money is no problem why not getting 5 x 1TB HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000 ??
u gonna need some time to fill that up.
 
I just recently purchased an Areca ARC-1231ML PCI-E raid controller. It works great - very pleased with it. The lower level cards would also work out well, like the ARC-1220. I opted to use six Seagate 7200.10 750gb drives in RAID5. It's fast, especially with a gig of cache on my controller. I run my OS in a 250gb RAID5 partition, then I have a 2TB partition and a 1.5TB partition. I did not want to exceed 2TB as it starts to complicate things with the logical units. I would not use the Hitachi 1TB drives simply because of the cost. The more spindles, the better. You might consider six 500gb 7200.10's in RAID5, giving you 2.5TB of usable space. That's probably your best bang for the buck in terms of performance with capacity. I paid roughly $245 each shipped/taxed for my 750gb drives.
 
I recommend the Supermicro 5 in 3 SATA bays. It will get 5 drives in 3 5.25" bays. Very nice cable organization and good airflow. If your controller supports hotswap it'll do hotswap too. I think I paid like $125 for it.

Then fill it up with 750GB hard drives. I like the Western Digital RE series.
 
unixadm said:
I just recently purchased an Areca ARC-1231ML PCI-E raid controller. It works great - very pleased with it.
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Great! I was also looking into that controller. I assume its under Vista?
 
Val said:
That looks very packed! :eek:
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It's awesome. good airflow. Drives stay cool. fan is kinda loud, but I have good airflow in the case so I replaced the high speed 92mm fan with a mid speed 92mm fan.

A++ Supermicro knows servers
 
Val said:
Great! I was also looking into that controller. I assume its under Vista?
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Vista X64 Ultimate and WinXP X64. I can boot both from the card without any issues. I have no drives connected to my EVGA 680I motherboard except for an SATA NEC 3650A DVD-RW.
 
unixadm said:
Vista X64 Ultimate and WinXP X64. I can boot both from the card without any issues. I have no drives connected to my EVGA 680I motherboard except for an SATA NEC 3650A DVD-RW.
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Thats awsome, thanks for info!
 
Asgorath said:
It's awesome. good airflow. Drives stay cool. fan is kinda loud, but I have good airflow in the case so I replaced the high speed 92mm fan with a mid speed 92mm fan.

A++ Supermicro knows servers
Click to expand...

The problem with me is that i want to build a near silent system with maximum of one-two slow 120mm internal fans for chipset/ram and hdd. So airflow will be pretty slow...

I think ill just plug the hard drives into the watercooling loop :)
 
Val said:
I was thinking simply RAID 5 of 5 barracudas 7200.10. 3TB of storage, nice speed and some redundancy.
Do i need a separate RAID controller?
Click to expand...
You may want to check Intel's documentation concerning the number of drives that the ICH9r supports in RAID-5. Unless you are running an OS that allows you to do software RAID-5.
 
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