I have to raid 4tb worth of drives, lots of 250's 300's and a few 320's. If I get all new sata drives ($500) it's around $1200 without the raid card and the spare hot drive. http://cgi.ebay.com/ADAPTEC-2610SA-64MB-6-Port-SATA-RAID-Controller-DELL_W0QQitemZ130061882403QQihZ003QQcategoryZ39968QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem The card is very cheap, $80. If I go ide raid, I'd need to round out the raid five with maybe one drive for each size. So say, $200 for the drives, but $300 for all the raid cards, plus now I have to keep a file server in my basement. Can anyone think of the cheapest way to raid 4tb , and build in another TB of capacity?
Cheap and 4TB RAID don't typically go together. Are you looking at doing a single RAID set or multiple sets? If you are going with a single set or really large sets, you might want to consider a card that can do RAID 6 sets (double parity). With that many drives you should probably stick with SATA simply to minimize the cable clutter unless you are putting them in a rackmount or some other huge enclosure. Heat will be a concern with that many drives. As long as you have the space, what you are looking at doing is usually the cheapest way. The only thing I can say is do not cheap out on the RAID cards. I have used a bunch of different cards and the cheaper ones always fail or have problems with synchronization. Adaptec is one of the better ones in my experience. I won't touch Highpoint again if it was given to me for free. If you can afford it, Promise has some of the best RAID controllers out there (RAID 5/6, up to 16 drives per controller, etc.).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010150414+131021336&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=414 Using internal drives, the best to go for if you're talking $ per gb would be 500Gb drives for about $150 each. The 750Gb drives are too expensive at over double that. If you're thinking about building a dedicated server, then just go with a NAS box: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=437049 There's also DAS which might be worth considering, but expensive. In fact, all I can think of is something like this: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=276030 The SATA one is even more expensive. Then you'd need 5 750Gb hard drives. Not cheap!
