Raid Controller Buying Help?

[dizplacer]

Well seeing as I have 0 fault tolerance and I don't want to back my 87 GB's up on CD... i think it's time to go to RAID... does anyone kno a good controller that can do raid 0, 1 and 5? (Good as in student can afford it...) (I think RAID 5 would be the best solution for my 3 HDs. no?) (They are 20GB, 27 GB and 40 GB, and yes I kno the stripe could be 20 Max...

 

[TunaBoo]

I am guessing SCSI?

 

[zoom8112]

diff size hds in a raid array?????

you can but you would loose some of the space....

as for controllers, the 3ware escalade 7k series are capable of raid 5..

 

[dizplacer]

actually i was thinkin IDE... i heard there are some good ones... no?

 

[dizplacer]

can't you just use part of the HDs? I kno software raid you can pick and choose sections of the HD and then have the rest free to use for a mirror or what not. If not I'll have to buy some new HD's.

 

[TunaBoo]

You really aren't going to want raid5 with IDE. It can be done with a promise controller, just seems stupid to me.

Go raid 1 or raid 0, I dont think IDE is good for anything else.

 

[dizplacer]

hrm yeah i suppose i could just mirror... a 40 GB mirror just seems a little wasteful when I could just raid 5 it... altho i could just back up all the data on CDs... hrmm... choices...

 

[TunaBoo]

Yah I am in the same situation. Still living on the edge with my lifetime collection of mp3s (25 gigs or so)

Raid 3 is cool and all. Not sure how it works in IDE, but the SCSI people seem to like it.

 

[Jiggz]

If your main concern is to make back ups, then just use an drive imaging software. Of course, you won't have the instant back up offered by raids.

 

[PoppaCap]

Is it possible to just run 3 hdd's at the same time as separate drives?
I don't have any with RAID setups or anything, so this is somewhta of a general question.

::Caps::