dgpretzel Wrote: > I'm looking at the Aopen N250A-FR motherboard-- 6 SATA headers, which I > will populate [gradually, as needed] with 750 GB drives. That board > also has 2 PATA headers, which I will use for system drives and a > CD/DVD drive). Unless I run into performance requirements requiring a > h/w RAID card (which I do not anticipate) I plan on s/w RAID. It's > just a personal preference-- plus I save the cost of a drive. Using 750 GB drives may make sense if you want to minimize drives, but it will cost you in terms of $/GB to use the latest and largest drives on the market.
You don't save the cost of a drive by using software RAID. RAID5 will cost you one drive's worth of capacity per array no matter if it's s/w or h/w based. If you plan on 'expanding' your array, look very closely at whatever RAID solution you choose - many can't expand the array on-the-fly just by adding drives. If you have to reformat the array to add additional drives, you'll need to find somewhere to temporarily move all your data, which can be a major challenge unless you have other muli-terrabyte storage devices handy. Also, if your plan is to grow the array... keep in mind that you'll need at least three drives to do RAID5. With two drives you can only do RAID1. -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23716 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/unix
