Neil, after looking through everything I decided to go with a RAID 5 array. It provided the level of backup I needed. The only other real option I considered was a tape drive but it was expensive for capacities of 100GB+.
Definately get an add-on RAID card with its own CPU and RAM. There are several out there for around $150-$300. Beware the ones that look too cheap to be true - they are probably offloading much of the horsepower to your CPU. I have 6 250GB Seagate SATA drives hooked up to it. Unless you have a bunch old drives laying around for some reason I think it would be stupid to go with IDE because of the cabling mess and lack of airflow. The other issue you are going to run into is with the partioning. If you go with NTFS then I believe you can make it one big drive. But if you want it to be useable for a Linux box you need to use FAT32 which is limited to around 180GB per partition. So I would figure out a plan for how to set that up because once you move a few hundred GB to it you are pretty much set in stone :) On 2/11/06, Neil Davidson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I need to build a 1TB+ array sometime soon. Completed ripping my CDs to FLAC > and that takes one 400gig drive (with a little head room for growth) and am > running through my DVDs now. Quickly filling the two 250gig drives I have :( > > Looking at an Infrant ReadyNAS NV, very cool :) > > http://www.infrant.com > > Can run SlimServer for my two SqueezeBoxes too > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Weeden > > Sent: 11 February 2006 03:49 > > To: The Hardware List > > Subject: Re: [H] Hard drives, who says size doesn't matter? > > > > Or you NEED several hundred gigs of space? > > > > 5 years ago that was insane for a home user. Now, my 1.5 TB > > RAID array is half full. > > > > > > -- > > Brian > > > > -- Brian
