[opti6600]

Is there any way of setting up a 16-drive RAID array (0+1), while still maintaining halfway decent performance comparable to that of a single controller?

This will be set up as my house's storage server, with 16 Maxtor 160 gig HDDs, i.e. 1.3 TB mirrored onto a backup set of drives. I'll be using a board that supports 64-bit PCI. There really isn't a significant need to have ultra-high performance, but I would like to have it setup as a single logical drive.

Are there any controllers that support 16 IDE drives?

 

[Guest]

Welcome to Tech Support Forums opti6600.

In my opinion this would truly be flirting with disaster!

The odds of one of those drives failing would be pretty good.

And this may destroy the whole array.

As far as the controller goes I would do a google search for the answer to this.

 

[JAMMAN]

There really isn't a significant need to have ultra-high performance

Welcome to the forum, you super user. With your above quote it seems kinda useless having so many hard drives- so why don't you send a few to me? JUST KIDDING of course and I haven't heard of such a controller; especially for IDE. I'll check with a guy I know that does hosting and get back with you.

 

[opti6600]

Hey, thanks for checking with your friend man!

Another option I was looking into was trying to find a card that could connect to the same brand through a proprietary interface (thereby overcoming the problems with the PCI bus). Anybody remember Voodoo SLI cards?

And in response to zee person who mentioned drive failures (I think it was Speedo), that is the reason im going for the 0+1/10 flavor of RAID. It mirrors the stripes, and with most controllers, if there is a drive failure, it runs at about 50% performance until you pop in a new drive. When you do replace the drive, the controller can just bring the new drive up to speed by copying the mirror image. Of course, you can do this with RAID5 and such, but the problem is that I just can't trust something that is so insanely complicated, and that I can't understand in less than ten minutes (I like 0+1, its easy!).

 

[opti6600]

And as far as giving the kind people over here drives...eh. Not to much of a need, as 200 gig drives (or Serial ATA...droooool) will be around by the time I put the server in.

See...the reason I'm doing this is that we're doing a second-story addition to the house, and as the resident geek, I want to wire the house up with CAT6 running a gigabit network... I always find it amazing that I could go out and get a car for the price of some of these decent gigabit switches (3com?!).

The server has to wait until we build the tech room upstairs, and I figure out how to make my rack-moving scheme, and have the Crestron stuff installed...and so on and so forth.

Long and complicated process, and I'll probably be here a lot.

 

[rmoody]

Dude, you are way to rich or something :smooch: . I hear you on the gigabit switches, they are insanely expensive, the cheapest I have seen is about 800 bucks and that's just an 8 port. Anyway, you want an 8 channel ATA RAID controller, correct? I saw this company called 3Ware, they have up to 12 channel ATA RAID controllers and I saw something about SeiralATA on their homepage. www.3ware.com Have fun, I hope you choke on all those toys :angel: (just kidding)

 

[opti6600]

Gigabit and Controllers

I understand your response in terms of the cost of gigabit networking. Actually, $800 is just the starting cost of most gigabit switches. The ones we're looking at are in the range of $5,000 a piece (24 ports gigabit over copper).

As far as hard drives are concerned...I would prefer a 16 drive array, however, on one controller card. The largest out there is about 12 channels, however. So I imagine that indeed an 8 channel card would suffice. Thanks!