Inexpensive RAID Storage
As the home media experience becomes increasingly digital and decreasingly attached to physical media, and as software backup solutions for home PCs/Macs require more and more server space, I’ve been thinking it’s about time I put together the most economical RAID I can. I already have my motherboard, CPU/fan, and RAM is easy to come by on eBay. The difficult part, however, is coming across cases, PSUs, and drives to fit the requirements of cheap home RAID. Any suggestions?
Check out the 1TB Fantom G-Force MegaDisk, for $359.99. Buying four of these and configuring them for RAID 5 will cost about $1400, and they look good to boot! :)
You may be able to beat that price if you’re willing to shop to find the right deals. The best price I’ve found on a 500GB hard drive is $129 (US). With eight drives, you’re already over $1000. We’ve seen server cases for under $100. Again it takes some shopping. Try tigerdirect.com, newegg.com and pcalchemy.com.
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Granted, this is an older query, but here’s my 2 cents on RAID.
Things to consider :
- How much space do you require?
- Is the digital content being placed on the RAID box already been backed up separately? If so, then instead of going with RAID 5 go for a RAID 0 implementation, for the enhanced performance (no redundancy tho). Now, if it is not already backed up content, then RAID-1 isn’t so bad, double the read speed (using 2 drives), with redundancy. The issue I have with RAID 5 is that it takes a minimum of 3 HDD units to implement. Also, for example a 1 TB RAID 5 implementation, will only yield you roughly shy of 700GB of actual usable storage space, the difference is used for the parity information (the redundancy to protect your data in the event anything goes wrong).
If the money is there, go for 2 Terabyte drives in a RAID 1 configuration, you’ll get your full access to the Terabyte of space and still have your data protected.
As for Cases, I usually suggest the cases from Antec. My current Sonata 1 case will be turned into a NAS RAID box somewhere in the future (It already has an ASUS A7V inside, with a built in proprietary Promise Raid controller that supports RAID 0 & 1) An alternative for a RAID box would be the Antec P180B Extreme, it’s in the “super mid tower” class.
That’s my 2 cents on this, btw Cali, love your show :) you were cool on Call for Help tv also.
Marc
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