Four 3TB drives in a RAID5

[Xobyte]

I've been debating digitizing my entire DVD collection (and BluRay when I buy a drive) for a while now. I've finally come into enough money to make this plausible, but I figured it would be a good idea to run the plan by a few people more experienced than I am before making the purchase.

First things first, this is the motherboard I'm running, and it supports RAID5 as long as they're going through the 6Gb/s connections.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128444

I'm running Win7 Ultimate x64 with 8GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU. I'm planning on buying four 3TB drives. Either these:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Western+Digital+-+Caviar+Green+3TB+Internal+Serial+ATA+Hard+Drive+for+Desktops+-+Black/Silver/2927251.p?id=1218397401269&skuId=2927251

or since they're cheaper, these after removing the casings:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Western+Digital+-+My+Book+Essential+3TB+External+USB+3.0/2.0+Hard+Drive+-+Black/1261281.p?id=1218244145647&skuId=1261281

The plan is to set up a RAID5 array for a 9TB drive with redundancy. I understand writing will be slow, but my primary concern is with size and redundancy, since I have a lot of movies, and streaming them to my PS3 will be more convenient in a single directory. I've also had a couple large capacity drives fail on me in the past, so I'm skittish about drive failures.

Is this plan feasible? Will my mobo be sufficient for this array, or would I be better off buying a card to handle this? I have to admit, though I've been building systems for many years now, I've never set up a RAID before, so this will be my first attempt. Is there a particular piece of software I should be using, or will Win7 handle the set up for this fine?

 

[Dereck47]

Is this plan feasible? Will my mobo be sufficient for this array, or would I be better off buying a card to handle this? I have to admit, though I've been building systems for many years now, I've never set up a RAID before, so this will be my first attempt. Is there a particular piece of software I should be using, or will Win7 handle the set up for this fine?

Yes, it's feasible. You don't need to buy a RAID card for 4 HDDs. If they were 4 SSDs that might be a different story.
Create a firmware RAID (via your motherboard BIOS) rather than a software RAID (via Windows 7).
The only software you will need are your motherboard RAID drivers.

 

[HugoStiglitz]

Yes it will work. HOWEVER

if your motherboard fails you could loose the entire lot of info since your raid controller is onboard.

i would suggest a card or even external NAS device that supports RAID 5 (drobo or something simmular are great)

 

[JackNaylorPE]

2nd the NAS idea. I'd set this up in X-RAID

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822122081

With these drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148748

http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82

 

[palladin9479]

Yes what your talking about will work.

Ignore this over priced POS

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822122081

And instead get something like this,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816322004

Supports RAID 5 / 10 and use's eSATA 3.0Gbps or USB 3.0 for it's interface. My suggestion is to use the eSATA interface as it's more responsive but the USB is good for emergency connecting it up to get your data.

I own one of these and their quality is excellent.

Review from someone who use's in the same fashion you will.

From: h0rr0raficianad0

Pros: Works great with 4x Hitachi 3TB drives. 8.18TB usable space under raid5. Shuts down and powers up in sync with my Toshiba laptop. Both USB 3.0 and eSATA worked well for me without a hitch.

Cons: I too fumbled with the device upon initial setup and figured out a small plastic plate at the rear lower part of the unit must be removed to "set" raid selection. This info was not found on printed instructions.

Other Thoughts: I'm very happy with the quality, durability & stability of the unit. Having migrated 5TB's of video from a wide asst. of smaller drives (320, 500, 750 GB), I am confident after months of use my data is safe. Files play smooth and instantly, if you need a device to migrate all your stuff (movies music etc.) buy this unit, it rocks! I purchased mine on sale and cant wait for the next sale!

Also this thing is ridiculously fast over eSATA. I get 120~160MB/ps when using fastcopy from a RAMDISK to the Array on RAID0. With a RAID5 your gonna see 80~100MB/ps from RAMDISK with something like fastcopy. It's real HW raid, not using software or fake raid drivers like a board or the above linked "NAS".

*Note
"NAS" devices are just a mini-itx board with a cheap atom cpu and some memory. They are running a customized version of FreeNAS linux. Their using "fake RAID" via the built in Linux virtual volumes. It has crap performance compared to real HW implementations and it becomes glaringly obvious when your talking RAID5 read / writes. If your going to use RAID5 do not go with fake raid, it's absolutely horrible for this.

 

[FireWire2]

Use this SPM393 instead it gives your 5 drives instead four drive...

http://www.amazon.com/multiplier-hardware-RAID0-CLONE-Controller/dp/B004JPUZWU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318458465&sr=8-1

 

[palladin9479]

Use this SPM393 instead it gives your 5 drives instead four drive...

http://www.amazon.com/multiplier-hardware-RAID0-CLONE-Controller/dp/B004JPUZWU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318458465&sr=8-1

If I was building something that I wanted enclosed drives for I'd use that. Now I wish they'd make that with a 4~5 bay internal drive insert. As in it consumes 4 5.25 inch bays and gives you 4~5 HDD that you can swap out.

 

[FireWire2]

Not quite! this controller is for internal use

You can use is as internal with this bracket http://www.datoptic.com/pci-to-scsi-1-bracket-adapter.html

 

[palladin9479]

Not quite! this controller is for internal use

You can use is as internal with this bracket http://www.datoptic.com/pci-to-scsi-1-bracket-adapter.html

That's exactly what I said. I just want an internal backplane with removable doors to connect it to rather then cables going everywhere. SCSI/SAS/SATA all have hotswap support, which is just BUS connect / disconnect commands being recognized. So have four drives that are removable through the front and plug into a backplane that connects to that controller.

Has absolutely zero to do with the PCI bus.