Help! Smoked drive (literally) on raid-5 array

I know I haven't been registered here long, but I've been lurking since '96, and I've been amazed at some of the things I've seen here. I'm hoping for at least one more miracle now that one of the drives in a raid-5 array I had finally died. It wouldn't be a problem normally, but for some reason the array was rebuilding at the time (I was trying to track down the root cause when this happened), and now I'm down to about 3.5 out of the 5 original drives (1 known DEAD, 3 known good, 1 in the middle of a rebuild I'm convinced it didn't need, so may still be salvageable, I hope and pray). Raid controller is an sx6000 from promise (I know, it's junk, but it was all I could afford when I got it), and the drives are old wd25000jb's. I really don't know if the new versions are the same, or if they would limit my ability to possibly save this mess, but I really need to know if anyone has one of the early 250GB drives that they would be willing to sell, so that I can replace the old one with an identical part. The new ones all seem to have 8meg buffers, and I'm concerned, possibly different platters (even a meg smaller and I'm sunk for sure). I would guess that if I put a bigger drive in to replace it, it would probably be ok (not sure I want to test my luck even that far), but I could really use any insight/help/whatever that anyone could give me on this. This array has gone down before (years ago), and I was able to save it, even though it was listed as "off line" by the controller for a while (till I destroyed the array and re-created an identical one). The difference this time is that the controller board on the bad drive has some smoked logic, and isn't coming back, ever. I even tried swapping boards from one of it's brothers, which helps, and it at least spins up, but even the bios still won't see it, and it makes BAD noises (worse than my old 75gxp's ever did).

Here's the board:



It made a flash, a gut wrenching smell, and a little bit of the magic smoke escaped, and that was that. Bridging over where the burned up component was with a single strand of the finest wire I could find (soldered on) didn't cause it to do anything at all. May as well not have even been plugged in. I've heard bad things from people who opened a modern 7200rpm drive up for window mods (no success stories to date), but I'm willing to risk another drive to possibly even swap out platters, as long as it's not one of the remaining 4 that I may still be able to salvage data from. Any opinions? Anybody even heard of somebody getting away with this outside of a lab? I'm desperate! Some of the things on that array are not replaceable, and no, they weren't all backed up (some, but not all), and most of the rest won't be easy at best.

I'm sorry about the length of this post, but I'm about to have some kind of mental break down over this, and I'm loosing my grip on reality about now! Thanks in advance to anyone who responds!

Lessons Learned:
1. RAID is not a backup. It's been said before, and it is now said again.
2. Read your RAID logs. Probably the rebuilding drive was rebuilding over and over again, thus in error, or your RAID rebuild triggered trouble on a disk. Rebuilds are, unfortunately, due to the number of reads, the most common time for drive failure.
3. I wouldn't try soldering wildly against a HDD. Probability of short is higher than probability of success.
4. Your data's probably gone if the drive was in a rebuild. Sorry man.

Ya, I know. I've gotten my data back (when a drive was rebuilding, and the card "lost" another one for no reason) before, with this card no less. It's not a new trick for this setup, just one it hasn't pulled for quite a while. As far as soldering on the drive, I had the the board off, and the area was (relatively) clear. I've got some experience soldering on boards and IC's too. It doesn't matter anyway, I swapped a controller board from another drive onto it already, and the whole drive is seriously wasted. I'm way too familiar with the IBM deathstar "click of death", and this is an order of magnitude worse, plus it won't show up in the bios anyway (with the original or a donor board on it), so kind of a moot point. Given my past experience with this card, I give my data a 50/50 chance if I can get another drive in there before anything else happens. I'll have to check the integrity of every file, but at least I'd know what I had to replace then. I'm seriously considering taking the dead drive to a friend of mine with access to a clean room at work to see if he can swap the platters into a good drive, but I moved recently, and it's a 6 hour drive to get to him now, so it's a last resort. Anyway, thanks for the moral support.

This whole thing has me reevaluating what I've got. I know that the promise cards have developed kind of a bad reputation. Who's got the most solid raid-5 board out there? I can't afford scsi, and I already have 5 pata drives, but If I can work some kind of magic to free any money up, I may be able to sell off what I have in favor of serial ata if it's reasonably likely to improve reliability. I'm dreaming about the lsi 6 channel card or even the highpoint 8 channel on newegg. How bad of an idea is it to use adapters to go from pata to sata on a raid setup like this? Adapters just make me nervous. One more point of failure. Speed isn't an issue, but cost really is. It's all moot if it's just going to crash again tho. Again, any advice at all is appreciated, and thanks.

Have you considered Linux software RAID?

Honestly, no. I run exchange on win2k server, and even with a very solid windows background, it was all I could do to get that running. My only experience with Linux was a couple of tries with it a few years back. I consider myself to be pretty competent with computers in general (I did troubleshooting house calls for a living for an a/v company that had no clue about them not so long ago), but I'm really not prepared to commit the time to learn Linux, get network shares, email, printer shares, and a number of other things going on it right now. Of course, the version of 2kserver I have will allow me to do software raid-5 with dynamic volumes, but I've never tried it. If it really wouldn't kill the performance of the array completely, I may consider that. Any opinions? The box is a tyan tiger mp with 2 1600+ chips in it. I've heard that the hit going from hardware to software raid can be pretty big, but from a cost standpoint, software raid looks pretty good. For contrast, is there anything in the hardware raid world right now that has a particularly impressive price to performance/reliability record? Ide or sata of course, I REALY can't afford scsi in the size I need it right now.

Oh ya, and I'm still looking for an older 2 meg cache wd2500jb to try to save what I can. I'll start with an offer of $50 and shipping to anyone who's willing to sell. I couldn't care less if it's still got warranty or anything, as long as it lasts long enough to get the big/important stuff backed up, it can self destruct 5 seconds later and I'll still be smiling. I saw circuit city had one on sale for $70 after some rebates this past week, but I'm not sure of EXACTLY what size it is. I truly am very worried that it'll use different platters and come up just a few megs short of the old drives, and therefore not allow me to recreate the same array that I used to have. That's how I was able to save it when something similar to this happened years ago. HD experts, please feel free to chime in here and enlighten me. Anything will be most appreciated.

DL: I feel honored to get an in person response from a mod (and I'm not even in trouble!) Thanks for the suggestion too, btw.

whbonny said:

DL: I feel honored to get an in person response from a mod (and I'm not even in trouble!) Thanks for the suggestion too, btw.

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Unfortunately, as the Video Card forums have been very busy lately, I haven't had as much time to devote to work and help out in Disk Storage. Back before Video Cards, it wasn't uncommon for me to have a post in every thread on the first page of the Disk Storage forum index. End rant.

As for your specific situation, post in For Sale Trade "WTB: WD2500BB-insert firmware code from drive label here However, given the mechanical state of the drive, I don't think even an exact controller board match is going to help you here. I'd want to proceed to the clean room option at this point, and hope you already haven't had a head crash.

You may also want to ask for help at the StorageReview forums.

Also, never forget that RAID does not protect data, it is only an uptime tool.

Just thought I'd add what I know... I've been looking at a bunch of different RAID controllers lately as I'm trying to build a file server for home.

If you're looking for hardware RAID, I've heard mainly 2 names tossed around... 3ware and Areca. There might be a few more companies out there that produce hardware RAID cards (I believe Adaptec even has a line of SATA RAID controllers if I remember correctly), but 3ware and Areca are the names that I've heard the most so far and the ones I remember. Their cards are among the highest priced, but each look to be quite impressive. Just for the record, I don't own either company's products and so far my RAID experience has been limited to the controllers found on a couple of motherboards I have installed in a couple systems here. But so far I'm sold on products from either company mainly from the many glowing testimonials and the accounts of successes of others. As far as price goes, both companies' products are priced similarly with 3ware coming in a bit cheaper (by like $20 or so). As far as what you're looking for, you should check out either company's site. However, it appears that if you want to stick with IDE RAID, 3ware seems to be the only one of the two companies that has a line of IDE RAID adapters.

3Ware
Areca

Newegg carries most of the products from each company and they are priced quite well there too.

As far as software RAID goes, I've seen names like Highpoint and LSILogic a lot so I'd guess they are pretty good. There are certainly others though. Newegg carries a bunch of software RAID cards from quite a few of the "big names in RAID" so you could probably check them out there too.

Hope that helps ya out a bit.

whbonny said:

the version of 2kserver I have will allow me to do software raid-5 with dynamic volumes, but I've never tried it. If it really wouldn't kill the performance of the array completely, I may consider that. Any opinions? The box is a tyan tiger mp with 2 1600+ chips in it. I've heard that the hit going from hardware to software raid can be pretty big, but from a cost standpoint, software raid looks pretty good. For contrast, is there anything in the hardware raid world right now that has a particularly impressive price to performance/reliability record?

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I don't know how software raid on windows is. On linux, (when DMA is on ) I get ~50 MB/s to/from 3 disks in raid 5. Older software raid *sucked*, since I believe it would block on read or write requests. So 99% of the time it would suck up all the CPU time waiting on a block to come back from disk. Newer implementations don't have this problem, my raid setup only takes 1-2% of a p3 933.

DL: I will. I haven't been to storage review for a while, but I guess that crowd would know if anyone would... As for the head crash/clean room, I agree. A controller board swap doesn't fix it, so this is what it's coming down to.

Joe: I don't have my heart set on pata by any means. I just have pata drives and raid card now. I really wouldn't mind upgrading at all. It's just about the money. My brothers both pitched in to get me $200 in gift cards to newegg for Christmas, so that I could stop using this ancient k6-2 (had to sell the gaming rig to pay wife's tuition this past year), but this honestly means more to me (hard to believe, I know, this k6-2 SUCKS). I'm hoping that I can sell off the drives and card that I have, burn the gift cards, and probably put in another $100-$200 and end up with a sata setup (cash is still REAL tight even doing this). The native hot-swap-ability of sata and the online capacity expansion of the new sata cards make it look pretty good, especially when I'm at the end of my rope with my current setup anyway. Funny thing is that I don't even blame the drive for the only true hardware failure this rig has ever experienced (looks like it was wires swapped on an old fan set up to run on 7v that killed it), I think it's just a combination of these particular drives and card together that's a bad match. That's why WD is making the RE drives now. Of course the only pata raid card out there with more than 4 channels now seems to be a 3ware 8 port that's well over $400 at newegg, and has pretty mixed reviews there. That means either swapping out drives, which wouldn't leave me with much incentive NOT to go sata and get a card to match, or spend about the same net cash to continue using my old drives with the 3ware pata card above. I was actually looking at these two in particular:

LSI - SATA
I know that lsi has been around for quite a while, and has always been more into servers than anything else, so I'm comfortable with the name at least, even if I haven't ever used their stuff.

HighPoint
I've used a lot of abit boards with HighPoint's raid 1/0 chips, and have been satisfied with what I've seen there. That's a far cry from a solid raid-5 board however. On the other hand, it's a good $50 cheaper than the lsi, it's got 8 ports vs. the lsi's 6 (not that I would probably use all 6 even, but more is always nice to have), and it's reviewed very well on newegg also.

Mage: That's exactly the kind of thing that I'm concerned about. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I would be able to set up a software array, test it and then go to a hardware solution. I would have to believe that the software array would be destroyed when I created the new array on a hardware card, and since the only possible way that I could (maby) finance this whole thing would be to sell my existing hardware, it wouldn't leave me with enough storage outside of this server to save most of the data that I hope to still have. Of course, it won't be an issue if everything is gone anyway. I'll be sure to update this post and let everyone know either way, and I'll do some testing on the software setup if it's an option.

It looks like 250-300gb drives are still the sweet spot for capacity/$, so I probably would go with another 5 250's, or maby 4 300's. I would hate to go to all this trouble just to use 300's and loose 100 gigs of space, but that's where the online capacity expansion comes into play again, and I could put up the cash for another drive when I have it (or really need it again).

I know this is kind of a mine field question, but having seen more than one of these WD's come DOA (none died in service, of their own faults anyway), I'm seriously considering jumping ship to seagate out of sheer paranoia. It's rare that I seem to hear many bad things about the seagates, and while they may not be the fastest, they'll be plenty fast enough for my application. 5 year warranties don't hurt either. Of course, I know that WD's RE drives are also 5 years now, and price is slightly in their favor.

As a side note, what's the MOST cost effective means of backing up a LOT of data (like over 1/2TB)? Doesn't have to be fast, just reliable. Probably only need to be run once a month as the data doesn't change much. I'm thinking one big (500 gig probably) backup HD in a pull out cage that I could just plug in when I wanted to. Burning that kind of volume of data to cd's sounds second only to Chinese water torture, and the free cd-r deals all seem to have dried up in favor of cheap (but not cheap enough) dvd-r's.

Also, I've been looking into getting a gigabit network card for this machine if the array's throughput would justify it. My next desktop (eventually) will be gigabit as well, so I'm combing ebay for the 3com 64-bit pci cards, since they seem to be the cheapest for a decent brand (and putting an intel chip in this amd rig just seems wrong somehow).

As always, any and all opinions are more than welcome.

I've heard a lot of good things about the Highpoint, and the 2220 supports OCE. If I weren't using linux software raid, that'd be my choice of controller.

As for backing up, a 500gb drive is probably a reasonable way to go. Using Ghost for OS or a standard compressor for normal files is probably the combination of choice. And kudos for thinking about backing up now.

Ya, better late than never I guess... I'm pretty hard headed, but this is kind of like a rock in the face. Gotta crack eventually. I actually do have some of the stuff I personally created saved in various other locations, but there's a reason that I built a TB storage server... I know, back up, back up, and off-line, off-site, in a fireproof safe, buried in a hole in the earth, in a concrete block backup.

I know that compression mostly depends on what you're compressing, but what would be a good utility and roughly what kind of ratio could I typically expect with mostly divx and xvid video and uncompressed (freshly ripped) dvd vob's? Is the backup utility bundled with windows worth anything or should I be looking more at something like winrar, or am I just totally on the wrong track altogether with these? I'm almost positive that the windows backup will allow me to just add to a backup file without rewriting it completely (big plus for a 1/2 TB+ backup). I'm totally open to suggestions.

Votes of confidence for raid-5 cards so far -
LSI Megaraid sata150-6: 0
HighPoint 2220: 1 (thanks, Mage)
Areca:Ouch, too much $
3Ware:Holy cow!!! Even more $

whbonny said:

I know that compression mostly depends on what you're compressing, but what would be a good utility and roughly what kind of ratio could I typically expect with mostly divx and xvid video and uncompressed (freshly ripped) dvd vob's?

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Zero percent, more or less. Divx and xvid don't compress further very well, and mpeg-2 isn't any better.

whbonny said:

Is the backup utility bundled with windows worth anything or should I be looking more at something like winrar, or am I just totally on the wrong track altogether with these? I'm almost positive that the windows backup will allow me to just add to a backup file without rewriting it completely (big plus for a 1/2 TB+ backup). I'm totally open to suggestions.

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If you use a Linux machine to keep the backup drive in, you can get a setup wherein you have snapshots from a given point in time of all your files. So you could go to "snapshots/yesterday" and see what your backed-up drive looked like yesterday, or 3 weeks ago, or whatever. The duplicates are stored in the same file, so if you don't change a file for 2 months you don't get 60 duplicate copies of it, but it still shows up in each daily folder.

If that sounds too complicated, the Windows backup is fairly good, as long as you're just backing up files and not the OS. Or just copy the files by hand. The problem with these strategies is that they require you to do it by hand, and I know I have a hard time remembering to back up important stuff. Automated is good.

I agree with the automated = good sentiment, but I was actually thinking about a completely off-line kind of idea. The drive would only even be in the server for long enough to perform the backup, and then be pulled, replaced into some sort of protected enclosure (considering firewire/usb), and stored somewhere that I wouldn't be tempted to mess with it all the time. The only problem I've ever had with backing up anything before is winding up with multiple versions and making sure that the right/best/working one ends up being what I save. It's easy when there's only one copy, but when it's important and therefore there are copies in 3 places, it's tough to keep them all in synch. I suppose that's my fault, and something I should really just get serious about improving with, not something that I should worry about when choosing software.

The daily snapshot idea sounds interesting still. Does it actually save copies of files that have changed, or does it just overwrite old files with the same name? If it saves old versions, how does it manage disk space? How would it handle backing up onto, say 2 400gb drives if a single 500 isn't enough (I'd like to not use any kind of raid for this just to keep it as portable and bulletproof as possible)?

Keep it coming! This is good stuff!

The snapshots work with a feature called hard linking. A program called rsync determines if files on the remote end have changed, and if not it makes hard links (which are like pointers) to the original file. Otherwise it creates a new file and writes the data there. So when you've finished a backup into a snapshot directory, what you see is the whole directory that you backed up. The advantage of hard links is that the filesystem keeps track of how many links there are to a given file, and only removes it for real when the last link to it is broken. So you can remove any given daily backup without deleting permanently any files that were modified or created that day. This also means that they only take up space once; your DVD collection or whatnot that takes up a lot of space but doesn't change gets hardlinked every day, rather than another copy of it being created.

This process, though, means that modifying a file even slightly causes a new copy to be created. Changing ID3 data on your mp3 collection would do this, for example - changing a few bytes at the end of the file means a seperate ~3MB file being created.

As for expanding to multiple disks, it'd be awfully hard to do without raid. You could do a simple JBOD fairly easily, and LSR volumes are portable to other machines/controllers - I've done this with my array, no problems - and were one disk to fail, you'd have a good chance of recovering half of the disk easily; XFS (recommended filesystem) breaks a disk into independent chunks which can function without the others. I haven't tried doing that, but it seems reasonable to expect it to work.

Just as an anecdote, I kept snapshots (7 daily, 4 weekly, 6 quad-weekly) from a nearly-full 40gb disk on a 60gb disk for about a year without hitting the limits. If you're changing large files, though, it can fill up really quick - you could make a "temp" directory that is ignored by the snapshot system.

Finally, here's the link for the snapshot system page for more information. I'll be glad to help you get going; let me know if you're interested.

Well, I do have one or two old machines (P160 and another k6-2 500 I think), and a bunch of small, old hard drives that I could use for the OS to make a backup machine. 4 or 5 years ago the p133 was actually my server, with up to 1/2 TB in raid 0 in it at that. I'm still pretty iffy about digging into Linux again. Don't get me wrong here, I would love to just dive in up to my neck (seriously, that's how I've learned nearly everything of lasting importance my whole life), but I'm restarting a small business after a long distance move, and just really don't have the time. I've already spent a fair bit of time on this array crash, and I'll have to make it up somewhere, or it'll cost me eventually. I've already bookmarked the page you linked to so that I can refer back to it, which means that I'll probably take you up on the offer to help muddle my way through eventually. Another option I'm thinking about is that if I make the swap to sata drives/raid card (I would really like to), I should have enough ports free to create a second array with my backup drives. Even if I go with software raid, I guess it should be just as doable. Please do explain what "LSR volumes" are though. I'm just not familiar with the term, and a quick google and wiki search didn't help. Of course, this would still leave me running a windows based backup utility (maby not as elegant or feature rich as what you linked to, which looks amazing by the way, but at least I know it already). I can set up the built in utility to run on a schedule (or as many schedules as I want). There is also an option for what kind of backup to perform, with options for normal, copy, incremental, differential, and daily. I'm not entirely clear on what happens to older backups. For instance, what would happen if I set up daily incremental backups and changed something friday that broke it, came back monday, and needed the backup from 3 days ago to fix it. I could do daily, weekly, and monthly backups, and give them different names, but I would expect that to use up 3X the space, and I would be struggling hard to come up with the means to store this data the first time. I guess it's time to do some more research. This really is great, I'm going to go bankrupt (re)building it, but at least I'll be learning a lot on the way.

whbonny said:

Please do explain what "LSR volumes" are though.

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Sorry, that stands for Linux Software Raid. You can move LSR to any controller (that is, put sata/pata convertors on the drives, put them on a different machine, anything). If you do decide to go the Linux route, though, those machines would be enough for the purpose.

Ok, thanks. That explains why I'm not familiar. I am curious about those converters too. I kind of buried a question about them up there early in the thread and then forgot about it, but that would certainly be a cheaper option to get me into sata (and a sata raid card) than swapping all my drives out. I'm nervous about using them from a failure/data corruption standpoint. Is this something at all reasonable to worry about, or am I just being paranoid? I see that they usually use a floppy connector, which I certainly don't have 5 or 6 of on my power supply, but I do have a few old psu's, some heat shrink tubing, and a solder gun, so I guess that's not really much of an issue either. Any opinions?

These are not the best idea IMO. They come with a splitter from a normal-sized molex to floppy and another normal-sized molex, so power really isn't a problem. I just don't like the idea of bridging drives, the convertors are probably fine in terms of quality and reliability. As you said, though, it's another part that could break. If you use software raid that's not controller-based, you could theoretically mix and match sata and ide drives in the array (although, remember, the array size is based on the smallest drive, so don't buy 500gb drives and put them in the same array) - this isn't the best idea in terms of speed, since different drives have different buffer strategies, platters, densities, stuff like that. Could be nasty.

Were I in your shoes, I'd look into a cheap software raid card for sata drives, get a few drives from Maxtor or WD (they're cheapest) and run software raid 5. Then put together a linux box and do software raid 5 and backups on it. Two seperate arrays is probably the best way to go, in any case; mixing new and old drives is a recipe for disaster.

If you'd like to move to all sata drives, post the drives on the FS/FT forum here and you can probably get a decent price for them and then buy new sata drives to replace them.

As far as the converters, that's exactly what I was thinking. As for inadvertently slipping in 500gig drives, I don't think it'll be a problem unless they get a LOT cheaper and quick. I've been running absolutely identical drives in this system since I built it, and the new ones seem to be the exact same size (exact same number of 512 byte sectors, I checked), and I believe number of platters. The only spec change in the new drives seems to be buffer size, but I have found that the controller boards are not identical either, which leads me to believe that there may be other low level hardware changes. In any case, I wouldn't expect a new (same size/brand) drive to hold back the array in any way. I've only ever mixed drives in an array once, and even then they were the same size and generation, just different brands, and it wasn't something that I was worried about performance on, I just wanted one, bigger drive in that instance.

I want to clarify what we're calling "software" real quick here too. Anything that doesn't do all of it's own calculations on a hardware chip qualifies as software from my understanding. I believe that this is an example. Unfortunately, it's only $38 cheaper than the full hardware version (not sure this is where I want to save less than $40). Either way, I should still be able to ghost it if I need to for some reason. On the other hand, I can do raid 5 with windows if I just have enough ports, motherboard or expansion card, doesn't matter. Ghosting this would be totally out of the question. I do have at least one, maby two ata100 cards that came with hard drives when people were really worried about the 137 gig problem, so I should be able to set this up without putting more than one drive on a channel until I got up to 5 or more. Either way, online expansion should be an option, but not migration from hardware to software (in case performance is really bad for some reason), or the other way around, without loosing all the data on the array. The cheapest that I saw a 4 channel sata card on newegg for was $26 with shipping, $50 for one with a name that I've actually heard of. Any more than that, and they get a lot more expensive fast. Even with 4 300 gig drives, I would be limited to well under the TB that I started with, and no easy upgrade path for later, short of adding another card (not THAT bad I guess). Of course bigger drives are out there, but for a hefty premium per gig that wouldn't really make sense since I could just use that Highpoint 2220 card and more 250 or 300 gig drives for more net space and less cost (still what this is all about in the end).

When this is all over, I think that I'll probably wind up doing as you and DL suggest, and get into the for sale/for trade forum and see what kind of funding I can get together for a full blown sata upgrade based on whatever my current hardware will bring. I'll probably just wind up with the highpoint card, since it's cheaper than the alternatives in it's class, but has lots of room for expansion (and backup drives on a second array). I'll just have to sell some blood or something. I'm thinking that I'll end up using a smaller drive for the kind of incremental backups that you brought up earlier, but I'll only do that for my smaller files. I'll probably stick with more of an off-line storage approach for backups of the bigger files, since they really don't change much anyway, and it could stand to save me an immense amount of space if for some reason they started to be duplicated in the backups. I really am curious if there is anything better $/gig than a big HD for backing this stuff up, but if there is, it's not coming to mind. I don't think that tape can even compete any more, right?

Anyway, I tried inserting a new 250 gig WD drive into the array temporarily, and after quite a bit of messing around with it, deleting and recreating the array, and "rebuilding" the new drive from the old ones, I'm satisfied that I've tried everything I can for now and that nothing short of the platter swap/clean room is going to do me any good at this point, so I'll post back here again when I get that done. Here's hoping I haven't had a head crash. Thanks again for sticking with me here also, mage, and DL for getting involved early on. You've both got some good karma coming back around.

Meh, I think I burned mine

I'd recommend the 2220 over the 1820 simply because of OCE. Thus, when you get a new drive, you can add it to the array without destroying and recreating the array.

Wow, I actually hadn't noticed that it didn't support oce after looking at its big brother for so long now. Good catch! That pretty much does rule it out for me. I'm thinking that I'll probably only buy as many drives as I need to store whatever I can save from the old array (if anything), and add more later as the budget allows, so oce is a pretty critical part of the plan. I suppose that I could even start with a raid 0 array and migrate it to raid 5 later if I started with just 2 300 gigs. I know that the 2220 supports that. I've got a thread started at SR now too (linked back to here of course), and the consensus seems to be that there really is no cheaper way to back up this kind of data than hard drives, so I'm thinking about just selling off the sx6000 card I have and putting the remaining 4 250gb pata drives I have into that spare k6-2 box on a fast track card in raid 0 for backups, rather than selling them all for probably less than a good new 300gig would cost me, and running without backups until I could afford to get more. I'll probably just have to wait or hope for a miracle to come up with the cash to buy the new drives and card in the first place this way. I guess I'll be trolling the hot deals forums from now on...

Thanks again!

Raid 0 for your backup? That's like using kerosene to put out flames - if the problem's small enough, it'll work, but if it's a bigger problem, you're screwed. Use 0+1 or 1+0 if you're worried about speed, or 5 to get an extra 250GB. When you need to upgrade it, turn the main machine off, plug new drives and controller in, destroy and recreate array.

I'm not worried about speed at all, I just need to sell something off to make this happen, and that pata raid-5 card is looking like the only thing it's going to make sense to part with. I guess I should dump the raid 0 idea though. I guess I'm getting a little carried away now. How about JBOD with 4 drives. Being that this will be a backup in a separate machine, the chances of both arrays going down at the same time should be minimal I think, so even if I lost the primary raid 5 array, I would still have this, or the other way around. To get the kind of space I'll need to do this means some kind of raid, pretty much no matter what. Anything with 50% of the space (raid 1, 1+0, 0+1, 10) lost to redundancy is just too high of a price to pay. I guess that I could always drop back to software (windows run) raid 5 on the backup machine, since performance really won't be an issue. That would leave me with less drive space than I started with since I'm down one 250gig, but probably enough for now.

Man, I need to stop thinking about this and start building it. I'm going to get myself in a lot of trouble like this.

Thanks for the reality check

Well, looks like the party has officially moved to the SR fourm thread. Thanks to all who have helped me out here. I'll post back when I have a final resolution on the drive platter swap, but it may be a little while.

My attempt to acquire a new drive:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1008193
And
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=21904
If anybody's still reading this, thanks.