Building home RAID5

[Ellessar]

Hi there!
I have an old Core 2 Duo E6600 with a Gigabyte GA-P965-DS4 mainboard laying around, and I want to turn it into a server. The main role of the server will be storage.
OS will run from a SSD.

I already have one 4TB WD RED drive, I plan to buy 2-3 more.
I used Intel Matrix RAID on that mainboard for years, but it was crappy even in mixed 1&0 configuration, so I'm going for a dedicated controller.

My questions:
1. Will be there any problems regarding drives > 2TBs? Mainboard doesn't natively support 2+TB drives, but I will use a dedicated controller.
2. If the controller fits in a PCI-Express slot, will it work no matter real lanes or PCI-Express configuration?
3. What controller to buy? I'm thinking about Adaptec 6405H/6805H (it's a way different than 6405/6805, so your experience from 6405/6805 doesn't apply to 6405H/6805H).

Thank you very much for you help and time!

 

[popatim]

I hope you realize the H series is not a raid card, right?
They are just a SAS/Sata controller; no raid at all, not even 0/1.
Then again you may not even want raid depending on what OS you will be running.

As for drives larger than 2TB, you would need the controller to support them.

 

[Ellessar]

I hope you realize the H series is not a raid card, right?
They are just a SAS/Sata controller; no raid at all, not even 0/1.
Then again you may not even want raid depending on what OS you will be running.

As for drives larger than 2TB, you would need the controller to support them.

I missed that H being a non-RAID controller. Thanks for heads up!
I will be running Server 2008R2 or 2012. But that's not important.
I need a redundant large storage. 4TB is not enough (RAID1) and I'd rather have 12TB with 4 drives in raid 5, than 8TB with 4 drives in raid 10.

 

[Kewlx25]

RAID 5 is highly recommend against because most of the time one drive dies, another drive is also about to die, and when you rebuild that dead drive, you put more load on the other dying drive, drastically increasing your chance of a 2nd drive failure and complete data loss.

Recommended is at least RAID6.

The biggest rave for storage is FreeBSD+ZFS.