For those of you following along, I've decided to go ahead with a four-disk ATA RAID setup. I looked into using SCSI, and it's too expensive for the benefit. I'm also a bit antsy (probably unfoundedly) about disk failure.
I've decided to go with a RAID 0+1 setup because of the speed advantages over RAID 5. I only need about 120GB of space for my purposes, so the 80GB drives that I will be using should provide more than enough space in the 0+1 configuration.
While I could set up a 0+1 with my motherboard's onboard HPT372, I've decided that sinking some money into a four-channel controller would be a better choice; I don't want the mirroring procedure to muck with the striping too much.
Although I'm about to sink a lot into this, I'm not made of money. As much as I'd like a nice 3ware or Adaptec card, I've capped the cost of a controller to around $175 (with shipping).
I've come up with the following list of possibilities:
1. Promise Fasttrack SX4000, $167.20
2. Promise Fasttrack100 TX4, $108.25
3. Highpoint RocketRAID404, $103.92
Which of these would be good/best for my purposes? (If you want to suggest another card, plese give links for specs and somewhere that I can purchase it.)
The only things that seems to separate the SX4000 from the TX4 are support for RAID 5, ATA133, and onboard cache from the SX4000. Since I don't really need these features, I'm leaning towards the TX4. The only thing that bothers me about the TX4 is that is doesn't seem to have any Linux support, unlike the other two.
Thank you for your input!
I've decided to go with a RAID 0+1 setup because of the speed advantages over RAID 5. I only need about 120GB of space for my purposes, so the 80GB drives that I will be using should provide more than enough space in the 0+1 configuration.
While I could set up a 0+1 with my motherboard's onboard HPT372, I've decided that sinking some money into a four-channel controller would be a better choice; I don't want the mirroring procedure to muck with the striping too much.
Although I'm about to sink a lot into this, I'm not made of money. As much as I'd like a nice 3ware or Adaptec card, I've capped the cost of a controller to around $175 (with shipping).
I've come up with the following list of possibilities:
1. Promise Fasttrack SX4000, $167.20
2. Promise Fasttrack100 TX4, $108.25
3. Highpoint RocketRAID404, $103.92
Which of these would be good/best for my purposes? (If you want to suggest another card, plese give links for specs and somewhere that I can purchase it.)
The only things that seems to separate the SX4000 from the TX4 are support for RAID 5, ATA133, and onboard cache from the SX4000. Since I don't really need these features, I'm leaning towards the TX4. The only thing that bothers me about the TX4 is that is doesn't seem to have any Linux support, unlike the other two.
Thank you for your input!
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