My RAID5 setup - your tips.

[dino213aa]

Hey all,

I do some work for a small public access station and recently helped them setup an external raid 5 to start storing digital copies of their CD archive. Once I got everything setup, I basically just pointed iTunes to the new drive and started importing CD's. Here's my hardware setup

PC:
Gateway 835GM (2.8 GHz, Pentium D 820)
3gigs RAM
Windows Vista Ultimate

RAID:
Silicon Image SiL3124 controller
No name 5-bay hotswap 300W enclosure with individual bay fans and two PSU fans
5x500gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA drives

So far everything seems to be running pretty smoothly. As expected, writes are a bit slower than with a single drive, but I have noticed some improved read times which has been especially helpful when queueing up songs.

Are there any suggestions or tips anyone can provide to help me keep things running smoothly? Do you all think this is a decent setup for what I'm doing? Or should I just go shoot myself... lol?

 

[drizzt81]

I am sure going to get reamed for this one, but I'll ask anyway: Why Vista? The little that your descriptions says this is a "mission critical" system, why run a very recently released OS on that? And why Ultimate and not Business?

 

[dino213aa]

Wow... "mission critical" sounds so serious.. I'd say more like "highly convenient" heh.. as for why Ultimate.. um.. I'd chalk it up to an overzealous station manager.

 

[drizzt81]

Wow... "mission critical" sounds so serious.. I'd say more like "highly convenient" heh.. as for why Ultimate.. um.. I'd chalk it up to an overzealous station manager.

ah, so if it were to crash in the middle of a song it would not be a problem? I am sorry it was not possible for me to figure that out from your post. Aside from that, I suggested business over ultimate, since I am a big fan of the less is more approach. The less crap you have running, the more stable -assuming a uniform distribution of failures over all components- your system should be.

 

[dino213aa]

Not really.. if the system crashed, we'd just treat it like a skipped disc and move on. The main reason we set this up was to reduce the need to pull CD's from the racks. This is convenient and also reduces the wear 'n tear to our discs. So, if this crashed mid song, we'd switch to a quick commercial break, switch the soundboard inputs to our cd players, load up and be on our way.

 

[drizzt81]

Not really.. if the system crashed, we'd just treat it like a skipped disc and move on. The main reason we set this up was to reduce the need to pull CD's from the racks. This is convenient and also reduces the wear 'n tear to our discs. So, if this crashed mid song, we'd switch to a quick commercial break, switch the soundboard inputs to our cd players, load up and be on our way.

It sounds like you did fine