Believe me mate, I wish things were simple when it comes to storage and backup as well, but it's one of the most complicated things I have ever had to deal with, be it for myself or others. I've built several high capacity backup systems for businesses over the past year or so and it's not getting any easier to decide upon what to use. When it comes to my own system, it's going to have to be perfect and impressive (because I'm like that...) and obviously that makes it even harder :/ Haven't looked at the link you posted yet, but I would imagine that 120MB/Sec would be very hard for an onboard RAID controller to sustain when the computer is performing other operations. It also may not handle large data volumes very well, I've had experience with that in the past. Looks good on paper but then you go to back up a 5-600GB partition and it grinds to a halt.
OK... pretty much decided. This running on this with this in it. That should be able to sustain writes to my RAID5 that saturate the gigabit, and also provide enough overhead should my wife be hammering it while I'm doing a back up. The mobo and CPU should sip next to no power, and when idle with drives spun down, will be a very low power drain. I shall go to scan later. I will report back when built. The server will trickle a mirror of the back up to the remaining Thecus 3200Pro overnight.
That SATA card is even more expensive than the previous one that you chose - good work! Pics later please!
I likes it - although for my purposes it may be a little too low power. Very nice setup for a file server, but I'm thinking (unfortunately) that because it's going to be running VMs, mine's going to need to be a Quad, and I have set aside an i7 920 for it I'd be easily tempted into one of those to replace the Dell server that I'm running here at the moment. Out of interest (and because I'm a component housing, cooling and airflow buff - which is to say it's my specialty) what case are you housing that in? I want to build mine into a modified Antec mini P180. Built a few home file servers for other folks in those lately
A quick note that the 'problems' with using 5400RPM 'green' drives in RAID is basically a load of ****. ANY drive will go to sleep and park the heads if you tell it to, and conversely any drive will NOT do so if you tell it not to. Platter speed has no effect on this, and platter speed is all that separates 'green' large-capacity drives from regular drives.
Pookeyhead - out of interest, why not software RAID? its not like the processor in your box has anything else to do!
Because to guarantee a healthy throughput, I'd need a beefier CPU, and at least a ICH9R board... which A: Costs a lot more, and B: Uses far more power. Also, I read too many reports of people not getting good results, despite doing all of the above. With this method, I can use a crappy £30 G31 board with a Celery 3200 in it, only pay a small amount more, and guarantee that I have enough write speed to RAID 5 to saturate the network if need be. It's a proper card with Intel XOR Processor and on board cache RAM. ...and also because I can It's built... it powers up and gives a single POST beep... but I'm trying to find a VGA lead, as I'm using the onboard GPU, and it has no DVI. I have one somewhere... but it's being evasive... Will report back later.
Pookey, maybe I'm missing the point here, but aren't the WD Caviar Greens tuned individually between 5400 and 7200RPM, so they could have entirely different spindle speeds? Would that not affect RAID performance?
Dunno... but almost every NAS box lists them as an approved drive for RAID. I'll be able to give you a definitive answer soon anyway LOL.
Probably too late but if it's a dedicated file server then you could just run freenas & let it software RAID it for you. Would be fast enough for most usage (& saves £250)
I assume western digital have also done something to help RAID array setup's, such as letting the slowest drive set an overall spindle speed in the array. This of course is only a thought.
Not a clue. I remember back when they were called GreenPower drives, CustomPC mentioning something about JBOD being the only possible RAID config, but things could have changed since then.
i bet pooky is really hating the direct this thread has taken. He cant return the drives since they've been opened, and now your shooting holes in it all! lol!
poor pookey, if there is a headache with what you say then no amount of cheesecake will make him happy!
