I want to do a RAID 5 setup for my future build. What drives should I pick?

3 200gb HDD's that you can buy from Office Depot every now and then for 50 bux after mail in rebate.
 
DontMakeMeEatYou said:
Budget is $300. Needs to be 400gb(total) or more.

Any recommendations?
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SAMSUNG SpinPoint P Series SP2504C 250GB. I got 3 of these for a raid 5 I'm going to build. The are like 70 a peice.

As far as a raid card goes maybe like a Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 off ebay. It is only sata 1 but you can drop a 256 stick of ram on it for cache(something most cheap raid cards do not have). I picked up one with a 256 stick for less then 100 bucks.

Another thing to think about in that price range would just be a raid 1 with 2 bigger drives.
 
Any benchmarks for your Samsung RAID 5?

For the RAID card, I plan on using whatever the DFI RD600 provides me when it comes out.
 
Just a bit of warning, if you use RAID5 it's most probably software assisted. If you are using the drives for storage it's fine but unsuable otherwise. Unless you get a hardware based solution you will freak out how much write speed is slow in RAID 5.

Example, Silicon Image 3114 is software RAID 5. Write speed is ridiculus.
 
DontMakeMeEatYou said:
Any benchmarks for your Samsung RAID 5?

For the RAID card, I plan on using whatever the DFI RD600 provides me when it comes out.
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Not yet. Thrid drive will be here wed. I ordered the first 2 and a hot swap bay before I fully decided to go with raid 5. I ordered a HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI Express with the thrid but I'm either going to return it or sell it cheap(like 75 shipped prob) once I get the Fasttrak S150 in which should be faster due to the onboard cache. I'm hoping the cpu load will not be as bad as well. Pretty much I'm throwing this into a pentium d 805 system on an intel 945psn board with 2 gigs of ddr667. Going to use it as a test enviroment for windows server then use it to store image files of clients hds when I take a system home to do a reload. Need to wait for the Fasttrak to come in. Got it off ebay so I'm hoping to see it the middle of the week as well.
 
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