Raid info for htpc please

[Zeggy12]

Greetings,

I am looking into building an array for all my multimedia files. I was thinking about getting 4 drives (either 750gb or 640gb). I'm just not sure how much space I would have if I set up a raid 5 or raid 6 array.

Would it be worth it to get an external pciE card, if so can you recommend one. I am looking more at redundancy and performance is not a major concern since all information will be stored on a server in a closet.

The main reason is that I have several dvd's (verbatim) that I keep getting cyclic redundancy errors and I'm tired of losing my data.

Btw, the motherboard I am now using does not support raid.

Cheers and thank you for your time.

Zegg

 

[EarthwormJim]

Raid 5 - space is capacity of all drives added together, minus the capicity of one drive. So if you had a Raid 5 array of 4 500gb drives, you'd have 1.5tb of storage space.

Raid 6 - similar to Raid 5 however it's the capacity of all the drives added together, minus the capacity of two drives.

Areca makes excellent RAID cards, however they're not cheap.

I'm currently using my ICH9R controller on my motherboard for a RAID 5 array consisting of 4 500gb Samsung drives. I'm pretty happy with it, performance isn't bad. The rebuild times are annoyingly long though. Around 20 hours. Plus when I move to a new motherboard, I'm concerned about having to rebuild the array. That's one nice thing about getting a PCI card, it's easy to migrate to a new computer.