Cheapest RAID 5 Hot-Swappable Setup?

[dbleoslow]

I want to build a separate file server for my data, video and music files and I want to do it as simple as possible. I want RAID 5 and a hot-swap cage so I have redundancy and don't have to break into the case to change a hard disk. What do you guys think of this setup? Do you guys think MB RAID5 will work well enough or a separate RAID card? I'm not concerned with screaming performance, just storage and redundancy.

--MB: ASUS K8N-E DELUXE Socket 754 NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
--Cheap Sempron
--HDD Enclosure: SUPERMICRO CSE-M35T-1B Black 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure - Retail

I have a case, PS and RAM to use. I was wondering if anyone has had experience with the MB and enclosure.

 

[jose]

Well from your mobo link, it looks like you'll have to use the SI controller to do raid 5..

That being the case it only has 4 sata connectors.. Thus you will have 1 empty bay in the supermicro enclosure.

I think Athena makes a 4 drive sata enclosure..

 

[Some1ne]

The main difference between the mainboard RAID 5 and the RAID 5 provided by a (middle-end) separate RAID card is that the RAID card will have a hardware XOR unit for doing parity calculations, whili the mainboard controller (and some of the low-end add-in cards) will need to do these computations through software on the system CPU. If you're just using the PC as a file server, then the performance impact of this shouldn't be too noticible (the speed of the Sempron you pick will have some impact though), but if you're using it as a file server and trying to multitask/game/do other things on it at the same time, you'll definately suffer a performance hit from the software XOR calculations.