QUITE URGENT: NAS/SAN RAID5 with more than 4 drives

if you want to do RAID 1, 5 or higher all drives have to be identical. same size, same manufacturer, and probably same model #

If you just want a single huge drive then you can run in "JBOD" mode but keep in mind if a singe drive fails, you loose ALL you data.


Im guessing what you may wind up doing is building another PC to house these drives you have, then setup the OS to treat them all as 1 large drive.

A couple years back I had promise SX6000, that is a 6 channel RAID 5 card for 6 drives with 128Mb cache, but it was far from reliable. I had put it in RAID 5 for 5 disks with one spare disk. Big money for nothing actually. I had more than 2 drives fail on several occasions. The size of the drives was about 200MB so you can imagine how much data I lost, thank god I didn't trust it and taped it all :wink:

I do remember the size of the disk doesn't matter: it will use the smallest of them all on all. I'm not worried about plugging in a 200 while the others are 250: I'm not going to buy additional disks for that.

REQUIREMENTS:
- External
- GigaBit network connected
- Good cache level
- Supports 6 drives
- RAID 5 or higher
- Support SATA AND PATA
- Has good speeds (i don't expect wonders, I know what RAID 5 does with speed   )
- edit: more or less portable (U versions is not practical in our situation)

edit:
http://www.sunstarco.com/Network%20Attached%20Storage/M... is one i like but it's not so portable
http://www.sunstarco.com/Network%20Attached%20Storage/M... same as above: less portable  

edit2:
Just read about the terrastation, but unfortunately it doesn't support six drives   AAAAARGRHGRHRGHRGHRGHRG

Hmmmmm .... I've done a little Googling and it seems that your best bet is to create your own NAS using a PC tower case and a RAID card. All off-the-shelf products cost far too much or don't support >4 drives.

 

That's what I was affraid of  
I now have a machine running with about 1.5Tb on diskspace scattered around on some sata and pata disks of 160/200/250/300 of which some are on USB/FW. When I have to move to another office witht the data I have to move the whole PC with the external disks and everything: cables... And last but not least, the backup system is very elaborate on that machine, a raid 5 would surely save us time and money there as well AND power consumption... All in all a "portable" NAS/SAN box with 6 drives in RAID 5 would be ideal. I guess nothing is ideal in the current world