Question Use two raid controllers

[00GhostConn]

Hello all, I'm currently in the process of building a home media server. I will be running a raid 5 configuration with 8 4tb hard drives. Im currently using a vantech ugt-st644r controller card, I plan on erasing the current array before upgrading. My question is can I use 2 identical raid controller to utilize 8 total sata 3 ports for my raid 5 configuration? Both cards will be the vantech UGT-ST644R

 

[13thmonkey]

Do you really need raid, don't think of it as security/backup treat is as assuring uptime, so even with raid you still need a backup. Can you live with hours of downtime if you lose a disk and have to recover? Most people can.

With this in mind would it not be better to not go down the route of data and backup drives.

 

[00GhostConn]

Hey thanks for the reply. Yes raid is a must as I will have redundancy in the event of a failure. That's why I prefer using raid 5 as I can have a single drive fail. Replace,rebuild, good to go... I use Western digital red Nas series drives so the odds of them failing are slim. The other main reason I use raid is so the OS see's all the disks as one physical drive. Having my media archived on multiple drives in multiple directories would be a absolute pain! Not to mention speeds (read,write) would become a bottleneck in my setup. When it comes to programs applications such as plex it would be a absolute nightmare to have your media stored on multiple drives. I may just buy a good raid controller with dedicated 8 ports. Me being me decided to cheap out as Canada computers has the vantech controller I'm currently using for 70$.

 

[13thmonkey]

I just storage spaces, and then I can thin provision the drives and just add to the drive pool to expand actual capacity. Hardware independent and portable.