Looking to upgrade my file server

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DermicSavage

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 8, 2004
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I have a box at home that I have thrown random hard drives into. I just did a simple span via window's dynamic disk cause I was too cheap to get a raid card.

Now I wanna get this thing set up right with new hard drives and a proper raid card. I've been looking at buying three or four SATA drives and putting a RAID 5 on them.

Any suggestions toward a cheap SATA raid card? I'm not looking for any dazzling performance since it is all limited to a 100mbit network :\

EDIT: was looking at newegg and really only see two options
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816115030
and
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102080

There any other selection out there aside from those?
 
what's the motherboard you are currently using? if i only has PCI, not PCI-X, slots the bandwidth of the bus will be limited...
 
It's only got regular PCI slots. It I forget the model exactly since I'm at work, but it was a Gigabyte mobo with the VIA apollo pro chipset.
Dual P3 mobo for the home user I take it to be.

As mentioned before, I dont think the limited bandwidth will bother me too much considering that it is no more than a NAS now a days
 
Since you're not looking for a performance setup, what precisely is wrong with a software RAID solution?
Windows server operating systems, and linux/BSD will do RAID-5 in software.

BTW, neither of those cards linked are PCI-X, so, that's not a concern
 
Been talking with co-worker on the network side and he mentions that in the case of a disk failure on a windows RAID, there is a chance that the volume information for the entire volume could be lost(in relative thought, I suppose this wouldnt be an impact if the server doesnt go down).

I suppose that isnt such a big deal if it isnt considered much at all. I suppose I can just fiddle with the windows raid in that sense.
 
I would strongly suggest that you look into an 8-port card rather than a 4-port. 4 drives isn't much room for expansion, and the 8-port cards are generally not a lot more than the equivalent 4-port cards. In this post I attempted to detail the recommended cards on the market and their strong and weak points.
 
Wouldnt an 8 port card on a PCI slot just kill the thing? would it even work?

Also, I have an option of just using one of my old mobos with 8 SATA ports on it and use the windows raid. Are the risks with it bad enough to justify a raid card?
 
An 8 port software raid card like a Highpoint 2220 (~$250) wouldn't be a bad investment. It'd let you expand the array - buy 4 or 5 disks now, and expand later when they're cheap. Windows software raid doesn't do that. WSR is also pretty darn slow, from what I hear - like, 100 mbit ethernet is no longer the bottleneck slow.

I wouldn't call WSR risky. It works - but it's dog-slow and I haven't got any experience with it myself.
 
With all the features, yes. At full speed, no. You'll be limited to ~120MB/s, unless you've got other bandwidth-intensive stuff on the PCI bus. In which case, somewhat slower. But it should be plenty for media storage and such.
 
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