Raid Questions

[PAoReVoLT]

HI

i'm going to make a raid-5/6 storage server to secure my work not getting lost by corrupted harddisk so here are my questions

1) lets say i have raid 5 set up on A system with 5 drives then can i took out 5 of those drives and put it in B system without formating? if yes is i need to be the same raid card?

2) i'm looking at raid card at ARC-1680 it says "Up to (128) SAS or SATA II drives using SAS expanders" my question is what is SAS expanders? is it a hardware/software/or just a split cable? and is it means that i can just buy 1 cards and make 128 array drive?

3) which one do you guys recommend? between ARC-1680IX-24 and Adaptec 2258700-R 52445 or do you guys recommend something else i have GA-X48-DQ6 board for the server so i need the one with PCIe not PCI-X and my goal is to reach 20TB

4) currently i have Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS 1TB but the AS version is a lot cheaper now can i mix them in the raid?

thx in advance

 

[her209]

Wrong forum.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: PAoReVoLT
i'm going to make a raid-5/6 storage server to secure my work not getting lost by corrupted harddisk so here are my questions

Please don't assume this. You CAN lose data on a RAID 5 array due to a corrupted hard drive. I've seen it happen several times. I recommend that you keep backups of anything that is critical to you.

2) i'm looking at raid card at ARC-1680 it says "Up to (128) SAS or SATA II drives using SAS expanders" my question is what is SAS expanders? is it a hardware/software/or just a split cable? and is it means that i can just buy 1 cards and make 128 array drive?

Wikipedia: Serial Attached SCSI (see section on SAS Expanders)

 

[kevnich2]

I recommend RAID only in a business environment where uptime is critical. RAID basically gives maximum uptime for data in case a drive fails, that's it. I have seen data go bad on a RAID array, though. As RebateMonger suggested, keep backups. In my house, I don't need maximum uptime, my drive can go down for an hour or so if my drive fails so I can put in a replacement, but I do keep multiple backups as I cannot lose my data. RAID is NOT a backup and shouldn't be used as one. Hard drives today are cheap, if the data is critical to you, it's worth a few hundred dollars to get a nice large USB backup drive and backup your data regularly to it (I backup mine once a day to rotating drives that I swap in and out once a week)