Home File Server... suggestions.

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Gazoo

Gawd
Joined
Mar 5, 2007
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So... with the falling price of harddrives, coupled with the fact I may be running multiple rigs soon, including HTPC, etc.

I was considering putting together a small file server with some expansion capability in the future.

Right now my main rig is running in a small A05B which I love, but only has 3 harddrive slots, only using 2 for now (OS drive and Data drive), but may setup a RAID0 or possibly RAID5 in the future..

However, I really want to wait to make this stuff and just ram in a few terabyte discs and continue to use that standard for a while (waiting till those drop to <$200).

I don't really want to buy a standalone addon Raid Controller, and would probably just run drives in RAID1 or maybe not RAID at all.

Are there any big drawbacks from just getting a cheap SATA controller with minor raid capabilities?

If the SATA controller dies I don't think it would do any less damage than that of a dead pricey controller would...

I can see myself using more than 6 ports (so a standard motherboard is out of the question... don't think there's 8 port onboard SATA motherboards, or wouldn't be able to afford anyway)...

What do you guys think?

Was considering getting either 2 Terabyte drives for now, or 4 500gb drives and throwing them into RAID1 as they'd be just for storage, building my way up to say 6-8 drives in total.
 
I recently got a SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA Controller Card
for <$100 with 8 SATA ports from the egg http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16815121009 to put in my file server box. This is a non-RAID card, which was fine for me as I am running WHS now. It is a PCI-X card, which works just fine in a regular PCI slot.

I've also got one of these 4 port cards in there: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815124020
for an additinal 4 ports.

Plus 2 SATA ports on the mobo and 4 IDE ports givens me total of 14 SATA drives and 4 IDE in my server. That ought to do it for a while, I hope.
 
I actually think I should be fine without raid, at least to start up, don't have much that I need to keep backed up too much, aside from a couple dirs of stuff.
 
Have you considered using linux software raid 5? All you will need is enough sata cards for your drives and you can expand storage when you run out of space.
 
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