Short on SATA ports

[Guest]

Hi everyone, I've looking into making a new gaming rig and I thought I'd use my current one as a media server since I really need a good machine running 24/7 serving TBs of files over the network to all the media centers in the house.

The machine is cool enough for this:

Antec 900 case
Asus P5D MoBo
Intel E8400 CPU
PCPower & Cooling 650W
Zalman 9600 Cooler

The problem I've run into is that I want to install 5 x 1.5Tb HDDs (for now) in RAID 5 and the MoBo only has 4 SATA ports.

Since I'm not looking into spending a lot of money on a RAID controller card I was wondering if buying a PCI Card with 2x SATA ports was a good solution.

Can I run a 5 HDD RAID 5 configuration with 4 HDDs connected to the MoBo and 1 HDD connected to the PCI Card?

Thanks in advance.

 

[clarkjd]

Can I run a 5 HDD RAID 5 configuration with 4 HDDs connected to the MoBo and 1 HDD connected to the PCI Card?

Thanks in advance.

I think that all the HDDs in a RAID5 array have to be on the same controller.

 

[sminlal]

He's right, you can only RAID drives that are plugged into the same controller, unless you want to use software RAID in Windows (not recommended). You'll probably need to use 2TB drives instead so that you can fit the capacity into 4 drives.

Watch out for such large RAID arrays - the unrecoverable read error rate on a lot of consumer drives is such that when you get to those kind of capacities RAID-5 doesn't really buy you as much as you'd think in terms of data protection. If your data is important then make sure that you have backups of it on external media.

 

[Guest]

I'm sorry I haven't said it before but I'm planning on using software RAID in Linux, is it possible then?

Thanks

 

[rand_79]

probably better off getting something like
http://www.amazon.com/Addonics-6-port-Serial-Controller-AD5SAPM/dp/B0031X58H8
or similar..

im not recommending that in particular.

 

[sminlal]

With software RAID you can include any drives you want in the RAID set as long as they're connected. Be careful though, if the OS itself is on a redundant software RAID set it may not be able to boot if a drive dies. That kind of defeats the purpose of redundant RAID.