IDE Raid 5 and data recovery

[BigFatCow]

I lost a 160 gig hd in my server at home, so Ive decided to RMA it, buy one more drive and get a raid 5 card so i can have some redundancy. Im gonna have 3 160gb seagate 8mb cache HD's and i might be adding another HD a few months down the road. I was looking at this card, and was wondering if it was a good card for doin what i want? Speed isnt really an issue, i will be using a seperate drive for the boot drive probally and the raid 5 will just be used for massive data storage. I also know nothing about setting up raid 5.

edit: ok, ive tried everything i can think of to get the data off of my dead HD. When i put it as a slave drive in another computer it says the disk isnt formatted, when i try to repair the win 2000 install it says the disk is damaged and it gives me the option to format it. I really need to get some of the files off of this HD so can anyone recommend a good data recovery program, or another thing i can try to get the data off?

 

[CrashX]

I've never had experience with the Promise Raid 5 card, but I am sure it's fine.
But if I was going to spend the money, I would definetely get a 3ware.
3Ware
They make excellent IDE Raid cards, with great drivers, support and reliability. I have built half a dozen servers with them and 4 200GB drives in each.

 

[BigFatCow]

Originally posted by: CrashX
I've never had experience with the Promise Raid 5 card, but I am sure it's fine.
But if I was going to spend the money, I would definetely get a 3ware.
<a class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.3ware.com/products/parallel_ata.asp" target=blank>3Ware</A>
They make excellent IDE Raid cards, with great drivers, support and reliability. I have built half a dozen servers with them and 4 200GB drives in each.

thanks for the reply but the cheapest 3ware card i see on newegg is $254.00 and i dont feel like spending quite that much. Im guessing the promise will be good based just on the name, but it is a very cheap card considering it supports raid 5 so i wasnt quite sure if it would be good.

 

[dartworth]

hmmm...speaking of RAID 5, check this rig out from one of the boys over at [ H ]

very cool

 

[BigFatCow]

Originally posted by: dartworth
hmmm...speaking of RAID 5, check this rig out from one of the boys over at [ H ]

very cool

damn, thats alot of storage.

 

[redbeard1]

People rave about this program, but I've never used it. I looked around their site and I can't figure out how much a full version would cost. But all of their progams have trial versions so you could find out what it would recover.

R-studio

 

[aka1nas]

Just keep in mind that RAID 5 is SLOW if you don't have a good controller. Especially for writes. I was considering the same thing a few months ago but decided that it would probably be better to get a 4th drive and a cheaper card and do RAID 0+1 instead. What kind of usage does your server get?

 

[BigFatCow]

Originally posted by: redbeard1
People rave about this program, but I've never used it. I looked around their site and I can't figure out how much a full version would cost. But all of their progams have trial versions so you could find out what it would recover.

R-studio

thanks, ill try it out.

 

[BigFatCow]

Originally posted by: aka1nas
Just keep in mind that RAID 5 is SLOW if you don't have a good controller. Especially for writes. I was considering the same thing a few months ago but decided that it would probably be better to get a 4th drive and a cheaper card and do RAID 0+1 instead. What kind of usage does your server get?

My server isnt really a server its more of a workhorse/file server so it doesnt see much usage at all it gets a max of 2 people connected at a time over the network, but its usually just me connected. The main reason i want the raid 5 is for the redundancy, since i lost 2 hds over the last year. My server is running 24/7 either doin SETI or encoding some movie which is why my IDE drives probally failed. I wish I could get SCSI drives but I need massive amounts of storage and I dont have that kind of money.

 

[cbqwinner]

Funny you should ask. I'm recovering data off an 80 gig barracuda as i type. I use File Scavenger from quetek.com. My HD crashed for some reason and the first two partions are blown away. As in it said they were corrupted and couldn't find any data on them. I went to tucows and dl'd a bunch of undelete programs and none of them could find anything except File Scavenger. It's $39.99 but to me it's well worth it. Some of the testomonails on their sites are from people that lost data on RAID setups. I would defently check them out.

The trial will show you all the files it finds, but you can only recover those under 64k or so. It's something really stupid, but it will show you all your files.

 

[BigFatCow]

Originally posted by: cbqwinner
Funny you should ask. I'm recovering data off an 80 gig barracuda as i type. I use File Scavenger from quetek.com. My HD crashed for some reason and the first two partions are blown away. As in it said they were corrupted and couldn't find any data on them. I went to tucows and dl'd a bunch of undelete programs and none of them could find anything except File Scavenger. It's $39.99 but to me it's well worth it. Some of the testomonails on their sites are from people that lost data on RAID setups. I would defently check them out.

The trial will show you all the files it finds, but you can only recover those under 64k or so. It's something really stupid, but it will show you all your files.

was your HD formatted as FAT32 or NTFS?