Raid controller for fileserver

[bilsta]

Hi All

I'm looking for a reasonable amount of storage for a home fileserver Initially I was going to start with 3 x 4TB drives in raid 5 but would like this to be expandable so in a years time I had add more hard drives.

I was wondering what your thoughts are on this and which raid controller(s) I should consider and/or buy which allow me to add more harddrives In the future?

I was thinking of starting off with an 8port controller as that allows me quite a bit of storage. (8 x 4TB).

My budget is between £100 and £200, ideally somewhere in the middle

Also where would you recommend buying disks from these days?

Thanks
Billy

 

[RealBeast]

I like the Adaptec 6805, although note that it needs an 8x PCIe slot, I've used it in a number of builds.

Currently I like Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3Tb drives for moderate use arrays -- i.e. not mission critical. For mission critical go to the enterprise models, like Ultrastars. I buy them in bunches whenever and wherever they are, but I try to get a group of identical drives for each array down to the lot.

 

[bmark0610]

I am also looking for the same type of thing. I am thinking 2 SSD's in raid 1 for my OS and installed programs on the server. Then I would want raid 5? for my shared files and such... I want atleast 5tb of storage for now. So I am not sure about the amout of drives I would need...

What kind of RAID card would be the best for my situation??