Lots of storage

[ciphergoth]

If I buy one of these: and five of these:

and stick it all together using Linux software RAID, will that work as a relatively cheap (£370) 2TB RAID-5 storage array?

Will it be very noisy, and if so, should I be looking at getting one of these too so I can stick it in another room?



As you might imagine, I'm giving the whole question of backups a lot of thought at the moment...

Comments

[babysimon]

It might be quite noisy. Drives vary in noise quite a bit - when I upgraded the mythtv from 200GB to 500GB it got a lot quieter since I actually looked for a quiet drive, even though the drive was from the same manufacturer.

Why do you need RAID? As I'm sure you know well, RAID is not a backup technology; all it buys you is uptime. Do you need the uptime that badly at home? Out of curiosity, what will you use all 2TB for?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Hmm

* Noise: I'm now thinking the easiest fix is to move it into the spare room. I have most of a PC built and this could complete it.

Having done that, of course, I'd feel bad for having two PCs on 24/7, so I would I think move all the 24/7 functions onto the file server (DNS/DHCP and such, recording TV), buy one of these for about £60 more, then re-purpose Trent as a dual boot desktop and games machine.

* RAID: Hard drives fail often enough that it's worth having a measure in place especially for that.

* 2TB: well, 0.5TB drives are the sweet spot at the moment, and 5 is the minimum for RAID to be economical, plus if I've exhausted the 400GB of storage I have at the moment and I'm planning on doing a lot more backing up, then a small improvement will just be a pain - I want *lots* more storage. Plus I'd like to be able to rip DVDs.