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Raid5 SATA card suggestions?

F

Fryguy8

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2001
Messages
1,707
Looking to put together a little raid5 server for the house, mostly to store my music. I'm going to be using seagate 7200.10 320gbs, 4 of them (possibly 5). I will be running my operating system from another hard drive not in the array.

I want the ability to hotswap the drives while the machine is up and running if a drive fails.

I would also like the ability to add a 5th seagate drive later while the machine is running (or, at least without dataloss on the existing drives). I suspect this is a very expensive feature, and is not necessary.

Linux support is a necessity I haven't decided what OS I'm going to use for this server yet, and I want the flexibility to go either way.

This is just a home storage system. I really just want to be able to store my music, and be able to swap drives on a live machine if a drive breaks (I'd also like the machine to be at least somewhat usable for the 2-3 days it takes to get a replacement since I probably won't order a drive to just have laying around).
 
I'm a fan of 3ware's controller cards. I recently got a 9500s-8 3ware card that has hardware RAID5, and will allow for the hot swapping that you're interested in. It is a 8 port card which will allow you to expand in the future if you want. I got mine off of eBay for $250 slightly used, and it has worked flawlessly with my RAID 5 array.

Although the card is 64bit PCI I use mine just fine in a 32bit PCI slot. I just have to put it in a slot that has space behind the slot for the part of the card that doesn't fin in the PCI connector. For a home NAS application the 32bit PCI bus is plenty fast.

You will probably want to look at Super Micro or Icy Dock for a hot swap drive bay.

hope that this helps,

PJ
 
Yah i've got the bay covered.

1. Is it OK to use SATA1? My drives are SATA2 and I'd like to utilize the full speed of them.
2. Do I really need to spend $500 on a card?
 
The speed of you drive interface is going to be pretty irrelevant if you are pluggin your controller card into a 32 bit PCI slot, and then using it accross a LAN.
 
If you don't mind second hand, you can get a $500 controller card for half price.

You could go with a basic SATA card and then do software RAID. You could look into something like FreeNAS, or something similar.

You could also get a basic RAID card that does software RAID 5, where the parity calculations are offloaded to the CPU.

I like hardware RAID 5, but there are other options.
 
i like hardware raid much better most of the time, but i just set up a raid 5 array at work a 2.8 p4 ht, with 1gb and 4x250gb in software raid and it is great, i even had to load the server with a different version of server 2003 and it auto mounted and set the array after installing windows and drivers....
I have also not had to bad of a time usually onboard raid on newer mobos, i like nvidia's raid, and with a fast dual core, i do not really care if it steals a few % to work, i would rather spend my money on hard drives, and cpus..... I am also putting together a raid 5 array on seagate 320gbs will update when i get it online....
 
What kind of interface are you looking at for the card?
PCI, PCI-X, or PCI-E?
 
Highpoint is my suggestion. The 2220 or 2320 work for almost any recent board, and they're around $250 each. Decent performance, cheap, reliable as far as I've seen.

 
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