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Looking for opinion/experience RAID 5 setup

Last response: in Storage
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Hey all,

I'm looking at adding a RAID 5 solution to provide some protection against hard drive failure. I was hoping some folks could take a look and give me their thoughts.

The Rig I'll be adding the RAID to:

Motherboard: ASUS A8N-VM
Processor: AMD X2-3800+
RAM: 2 Gig (2x1024MB) DDR-333
HD1: 200GB OS/Applications
HD2: 500GB Media Storage
Power Supply: ANTEC SmartPower 2.0 500 Watts
Graphics Card: ATI AIW X1800XL
Sound: Creative X-FI XtremeMusic (to be removed)
Optical Drive 1: CD-ROM
Optical Drive 2: DVD+/-RW
OS: Windows XP

This is my all-purpose rig. I do pretty much everything other that Gaming (have a separate rig for that) on this system. What I'm looking to do is add a PCI-Ex1 RAID Controller and three 500GB hard drives.

What I'm looking at for purchase:

3 x Western Digital 500GB SATA-II
HighPoint RocketRAID 2300

The idea is to add the RAID Controller and the three 500GB drives to create a ~1TB RAID 5 disk array. Once formatted and ready for use, move all media files from the existing 500GB drive to the RAID array, Format the existing 500GB drive and then add it to the RAID array; creating a 4 Disk/~1.5TB RAID array.

Does anyone see any missteps or hiccups in the plan?
Is my power supply sufficient for 5 Hard Drives? The Extreme Power Supply Calculator shows my proposed rig would need 476 Watts.

Any comments/questions/concerns would be appreciated.

-Wolf sends

More about : opinion experience raid setup

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Power should not be a problem.
Modern HDDs are use about 10w each.
So you are not adding much draw.

This system would be far closer to 300w under draw.

90w for the GPU
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/21/energy-efficient...

90w for the CPU
50w for 5 HDD (10w each)
50w for Mobo (over estimate)
Ram fans and others may add some misc power draw.

In short, you are definitely fine.

Note: Raid is NOT a backup. You may want another drive to ZIP and backup data.

I've currently a RAID5 on a Highpoint RR2310 and it serves me well housing all my media, movies, and mp3's. My only suggestion would be to set up the 4th 500GB drive as a hot spare assigned to the array rather than adding it to the array as additional storage space. Albeit RAID5 helps save from potentially catastrophic data loss, but if a drive does go bad having the 4th drive already connected as the hot spare will save a lot of time and issues. I also recommend installing the Highpoint software and following all the steps in the manual when configuring/setting up/initializing the array.

Recently, one of the three 320GB drives in my RAID5 array crapped out. I attempted to add another 320GB drive as the hot-spare after the fact and then rebuild the array. The Highpoint array software was unable to rebuild the array due to the hot spare not being configured with the array when it was initially created. And, because I did not use the HP software to initialize the array (let alone not configuring the hot spare to begin with) the software had issues recognizing the disk order and stripe size. Live and learn...

Good luck!

btw...I did not lose any files but had to spend $200 on a RAID recovery software suite.

Thanks for the comments, guys. I appreciate it. Good to know that I'm covered for power. I am a bit concerned about being unable to rebuild the array (without having a pre-configured hot spare). I'll have to think a bit more on that; do some more research.

Again, thanks!
-Wolf sends
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