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- Joined
- Jun 9, 2003
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- 7,102
Still working on getting my NAS set up, and the world of finances has reared its ugly head. At this point I have my little NAS box (thanks to a fellow [H] user) which is based around an IDE HDD Cage, and the Highpoint 404 4-channel IDE Raid card. At the moment, I don't have any drives for it. I plan to use this box as..well storage. Mostly media, but also ISOs, installers and the like. It needs to have sufficient overall performance to stream or otherwise give access to content over my LAN of between 1-5 PCs.
With that in mind, I've been considering my options buying drives. I've been assured that investing in IDE drives for this purpose (as opposed to SATA) will not bottleneck my performance. The big question here is if it is worth it to shell out the considerable cash for a RAID5 array right away. I wanted to get 500gb drives, or 400s if need be. I know RAID5 provides a little more speed and non-critical redundancy. However, 3x 500gb drives can be very expensive (750gb prohibitively so at the moment it seems). With that in mind, would I be better off buying and using each drive as individual storage, buying them one at a time? Perhaps I could change 3 individual drives into one RAID5 at a later time. I think Openfiler supports this, as do stand alone RAID cards.
So what do you think? Buy and use individual drives, expanding to a RAID5 later if possible? Or is there a significant performance/security/ease of use increase in starting a RAID5 from the beginning?
Thanks!
With that in mind, I've been considering my options buying drives. I've been assured that investing in IDE drives for this purpose (as opposed to SATA) will not bottleneck my performance. The big question here is if it is worth it to shell out the considerable cash for a RAID5 array right away. I wanted to get 500gb drives, or 400s if need be. I know RAID5 provides a little more speed and non-critical redundancy. However, 3x 500gb drives can be very expensive (750gb prohibitively so at the moment it seems). With that in mind, would I be better off buying and using each drive as individual storage, buying them one at a time? Perhaps I could change 3 individual drives into one RAID5 at a later time. I think Openfiler supports this, as do stand alone RAID cards.
So what do you think? Buy and use individual drives, expanding to a RAID5 later if possible? Or is there a significant performance/security/ease of use increase in starting a RAID5 from the beginning?
Thanks!