Looking for a new Raid 5 Setup

[MrSmegzabush]

What I have now is a HTPC w/ 6x SATA HDDs in it set up just as single drives. they are as follows 3x 1.5tb and 3x1tb.

Right now I am sitting pretty good on space, and have bout 5.5tb of data on them total. of videos/audio. I am looking for something a bit more redundant and I am looking at different options and seriously into raid 5. I dont mind spending about $1200 - $1500 on a setup that can store this with some sort of redundancy.

I do not need something that is extremely fast and but just something that will allow myself and maybe one other user to stream video from.

I was looking at this Rosewill RSV-S8.

and putting either 8x 1.5tb drives in it, or 8x 1tb drives in it, then hooking it to a Server 2k3 or 2k8, machine to create a single large Raid 5 GTP Partition using software raid in windows.

The machine It would hook up to is my HTPC which has a e5200 4gigs of ram. Is this a viable solution to my storage problem, or are there any other options in my price range that I could do?

 

[amp88]

Your proposed setup is very similar to mine. I have a proavio editBox E8-PM enclosure (8 bay, eSATA connectors, Sil3726 chips internally), connected to a software RAID5 controller (at the moment I have a PCI card but I have a PCIe 4x card arriving sometime today). I see that the enclosure you've mentioned comes with a Silicon Image 3132 PCIe 1x card. This will provide you with easily enough bandwidth to stream 2 full 1080p movies at the same time.

You've already mentioned you're not too worried about the speed of the system (so the PCIe 1x card is fine). Have you considered which drives you'll be using? Western Digital 1TB Green drives are good value (about 9.8 cents / GB), quiet and cool running. Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB drives are better value than the 1TB greens (about 8.5 cents / GB) but importantly there has been some controversy over them (if you haven't heard about it research it). The next cheapest 1.5TB drive on newegg is the 1.5TB Green which is marginally more expensive than the 1TB (about 10.4 cents / GB) but will obviously allow you to pack in substantially more to your enclosure. You will probably be able to find some slightly cheaper deals than these if you look around and get lucky, but I doubt they'd be substantially better.

The enclosure you mention + 8 * 1 TB Greens would cost just under $1150 and give you approximately 6.3 TB usable space in RAID5 (7 * 931 GB)
The enclosure + 8 * 1.5 TB Seagates would cost just under $1400 and give you approximately 9.5 TB of usable space in RAID5 (7 * 1392 GB)
The enclosure + 8 * 1.5 TB Greens would cost about $1630 and give you approximately 9.5 TB of usable space in RAID5 (7 * 1392 GB)

The above don't contain the OS license, so you'll need to factor that in too.

Now, as you're probably aware RAID5 is not a backup solution, but it's worth reiterating. You should have a proper backup solution in place for all of the contents of the RAID5, if you can possibly afford it. Presumably you'll be copying the contents of your current setup (the 5.5TB) into the new RAID5, so you'll be left with roughly 6900 MB of backup capability (3 * 1 TB drives + 3 * 1.5 TB drives). If you go for 1.5 TB drives for the new setup this will leave you with a bit of a deficit. It'll probably take you some time to expand the size of the collection though, so you could probably save up a bit more to make up the deficit in the size of the backup capability.

Your host PC (E5200 system) will be powerful enough for the proposed setup. My home file server is based on the Athlon 4850e (significantly slower than E5200) and performance is good.

An alternative solution to the above would be to buy a new case for the HTPC which is large enough to handle your 8 drives + a system HDD and CD/DVD drive. Then you'd get a RAID controller which had at least 8 SATA connectors (like this Supermicro card) and hook them all up your 8 drives to that rather than to the external enclosure using eSATA. Depending on your current PSU you may need to upgrade it to cope with the extra demand and you also may need to increase case cooling. I can't see the card above for sale anywhere, but the couple of things I've seen about it are mentioning an RRP of roughly $130. If you did go for this internal option it would save money but it decreases the ease of hotswapping disks and it could also make it more difficult to replace a failed drive (more difficult to identify it).