Suggest storage options

[jbass]

I am looking to put together some type of storage solution for music/movie/etc.. streaming to multiple computers in the house. I would like it to be expandable in the future and it should be capable of more than a terabyte. I am on a budget, so I dont need the best of the best. Just a working solution that keeps my data safe.

I am almost certain that I want to use RAID 5. This seams like the most reasonable backup solution since RAID 1 would take 4 500g drives to yield 1Tb. The RAID 5 would only take 3. My question regarding RAID controllers is: Would I notice THAT much difference between a software solution and a hardware one? I am not doing video editing, nor would I be moving data back and forth. The most load it could see would be streaming video to at most 2 computers at once.

I have done drive spanning in Linux in the past, and wasn't that thrilled with it. Not sure if it has come further, and/or if it supports RAID5. What is the best solution for me? Software RAID card with a few SATA drives? NAS ?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[BoberFett]

There's a bit of overhead in writing to RAID 5, reading not so much. If it's mostly reading, software RAID would probably be fine. Personally for a home system, I would never bother with hardware RAID. If you want to use Linux, build a cheap box with whatever storage you want and use a NAS setup like FreeNAS or Naslite.

 

[jbass]

I should still use a sofware RAID card? Reading through FreeNAS forums suggests not to use their RAID 5 configuration as it is not stable.