Mass Storage Questions...

[jorton]

I have been meaning to build storage system for some time and space has finally pushed me to make a decision.

I currently own 5 x 2TB WD (EARS) sitting in a nice stack all purchased before the floods at a good price.

I originally bought the 4 of the drives to use with a sansdigital 4 bay esata unit (and included highpoint rocketraid 622 pcie controller) with raid 5 but the drives didn't seem to play well even with wdidle3 applied to them. They would drop from the array (red lights on the enclosure indicator)

From what I see my only other option seems to be buy a NAS ($$$) or build some sort of home brew storage with Unraid or similar.

For a possible Unraid I have an old AMD x2 5200 on an ASUS M2NPV-VM mATX PC, 2GB DDR2 and 4 onboard Sata2 ports. I have a Silicon Image 2 port sata2 PCIe card to get me up to 6 sata2 ports total.

I'm trying to spend the least amount to get the most storage with some redundancy in case I lose a drive and possibly 20% of my recorded / ripped movies.

Are there any other options? I have a functioning WHS 2011 box (AMD x4 955 with 8GB ram on ASUS MB) with 6 sata2 ports and an addon highpoint rocketraid 640 (4 ports). Is there something I could use on the WHS2011 box that would give me a large pool like the old drive extender???

This is only for archived tv and movies so I guess speed is only an issue for playback. I won't be recording from Sagetv to these drives.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by jorton

Is there something I could use on the WHS2011 box that would give me a large pool like the old drive extender???

Two I've heard about:

Drive Bender:
http://www.wegotserved.com/2011/10/3...ddin-whs-2011/

DrivePool
http://www.wegotserved.com/2011/02/1...e-server-2011/

[Skirge01]

There's also FlexRAID. While I haven't looked into the WHS add-ins very much (which means they might work similarly), one thing that I always liked about FlexRAID was that it didn't actually mess with your original data. Since it uses a parity solution, it actually cannot corrupt the data you're protecting. Additionally, the drives can be physically removed from the computer and accessed by any other computer.

[Dargason]

Why not use Windows 8 storage spaces? Eventually you'd have to buy it, but for now it's free.

[PiX64]

or you could say screw windows and their drive pool and go with unraid... just a thought

[jorton]

I am open to unraid, just trying to avoid having three servers in my basement

It would be nice to use the WHS 2011 box for more than nightly backups.